Sam Evaluation question 2

How Does your media represent particular social groups?

First lets look at the characters in our

seuqence

Agent No. 1• Asian

• Young

• Male

• He seems the cooler of the two agents.

• He seems in charge (he has the tracker, and he answers the questions)

• Seems to be the protagonist and so audience like him because of positive portrayal (due to emphasis in framing and dominance over sequence)

• Character portrayed as an adult aged 20-25 despite actor being younger

• Seems professional (wears suit, and sunglasses, has tracker and gun on hand etc.)

Agent No. 2• White

• Blonde

• Male

• The less cool and more inexperience of the Agents (he panics, waves his gun around, makes empty threats etc.)

• Seems to be the protagonist (or sidekick) and so audience like him because of positive portrayal (due to emphasis in framing and dominance over sequence)

• Suit makes him seems professional.

• Character portrayed as an adult aged 20-25 despite actor being younger

Protagonist• White

• Male

• Young

• Black hair

• Blue eyes and ability to turn invisible indicate some superhuman element to him

• Portrayed as the most powerful of the characters (through hyper masculine framing, and by being the last one alive)

• Character portrayed as an adult aged 20-25 despite actor being younger

• The most conventional representation out of the ones in my sequence

Conventional protagonistof Action Sci Fi movie • Male

• Young (20-30)

• White

• Dark Hair

• Typically Masculine (Physical and mental ability, good social skills, good at job)

• Willing to take on challenges

• Handsome

Examples:• Neo (The Matrix)

• James Kirk (Star Trek)

• Cobb (Inception)

• Xavier (X-Men:First Class)

• Wikus (District 9)

• Kyle Reese (Terminator)

• Luke Skywalker (Star Wars)As Chris’ character fits this descricption you can see that our protagonist was conventional

Indian Characters in Action Sci Fi Films

• Oriental Asian characters feature a lot in Action films (Particularly in the Martial Arts Sub-genre) however non-Oriental Asian Characters are scarce

• In Action Sci Fi , Asian characters are even rarer, particularly Indian characters, who are heavily under represented

• In fact I could not find a single example of an Indian character

• The only example of an Asian character who isn’t Oriental which I could find was the Arabic character “Yusuf” in “Inception”, who is a supporting character, providing drugs and driving skills

From this you can see that Yadash’ character broke conventional representations of characters in Action Sci Fi movies.

Decisions we made while casting our film

We decided quite early on that it would be better to only use group members as actors as they would be easier to organise

We also put Chris as in the role of the Protagonist as he ticks the most conventional boxes as a conventional character (White, short dark hair, male etc.)

We choose not to worry about portraying characters older than ourselves as we thought that age would be irrelevant in our opening sequence

Gender in our sequence

There are no girls whatsoever in our opening sequence

We dressed in suits which have accentuate masculinity

We gave each character a gun, which has masculine connotations

Each character points their gun into the camera at least once in the sequence, which seems intimidating.

The absence of women in our sequence is typical of an Action Sci-Fi movie and shows how dominant men are

Race in our sequence

Our sequence contains an Indian character

As previously mentioned Action Sci Fi movies do not tend to feature many Asian characters

Yadash’ has a positive representation; he answer’s all of the other agent’s questions, and has the tracker on hand for when it is needed.

He is also the only one of the agents who offers any sort of resistance to the protagonist

He does however get killed by the protagonist who is white which could be seen as a negative aspect of our representation of this character

British-Asian culture in films

The past 10 Years have seen a boom in British-Asian films

These films represent Britain in a more accurate way to show how multicultural a country it is

These films are usually comedies, dramas, or coming of age films

Examples include: Bend it Like Beckham, East is east, Bahji on the beach, and Bride and Prejudice

Our film could be seen as using this culture to show Britain in a more realistic light

The ethnicity of the Asian character in our sequence has no baring on how he is represented, and this lack of significance in representation bares significance as to representing multi-cultural Britain.