How does your media product represent particular social group?

Our study of the thriller genre helped us learn how to represent different social groups and characters, the movie ‘Se7en’ portray their characters very well as certain social groups through there dialog, costume, emotional, physical activity and location they are placed in. David Fincher the director for the film ‘se7en’ conveys the actor Kevin spacey that plays John Doe as an emotionless psychiatric murderer who kills seven citizens because of the seven sins they have committed, he is quiet emotionless and empty. This is quite stereotypical for murders in most psychological thrillers, to add a sense of mis understanding. His low social class is shown through his actions and dialog.

In our thriller opening we ideas from other thrillers (such as se7en) and took into consideration about mis en scene to create the type of stereotypes for our characters we wanted within our movie. Our villain was represented as what would appear to a normal clothed youth, yet his actions of scratching at the floor and quick movements would demonstrate his psychological dysfunction, this would trigger the audience’s minds that the character was the uncertain one. The fact you do not see the characters face also signifies he is dangerous to the audience. On the other hand we represented the ‘film crew' through there character, age, costume to convey them as a higher class than the psycho. Through these representation we tried to convey them as more innocent and curious characters. The presenter of the film crew was dressed in a smart grey jacket just to add the fact that he probably makes more money than most, also to represent that he is probably the smartest and intellectual. The camera man was dressed more casual as he would not of been in the frame of his camera shot, he wore a blue jacket with black skinny jeans, this was to make him look like an innocent character, he would not of prepared himself for what was to come. The clothing of the film crew shows that there is nothing psychologically wrong with them. Even though they do not die in the opening, you get the sense they might. We tried to use the natural lighting within the building to represent the characters in the way we did, for the psycho we sat him off centre of the room, within the darker part to convey and represent that he is sinister, this added a sense of mysterious curiosity to the character. A soft light on the faces of the victims is used to show everything around them is dark, they cannot see everything, and this is quite conventional.