Question 2- How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The way we have represented women in our opening sequence is by using factors of residual ideology.

We did this by using close ups on the females face during filming to make the audience get closer to her and see how young and vulnerable she is, this works for a horror film as the audience knows the victim and will empathise with the victim throughout the film, also because of the fact that, during editing we made sure that she gets the most screen time. This is also the stereotypical character you would see in a horror film which helps the audience know the genre. This challenges residual ideology as the female is the main character and she gets the most screen time.

The audience can tell its winter due to the character wearing warm clothes. We did this to set up Barthes enigma code as to why all of a sudden panic has struck, the audience may get an apocalyptic feel from the sequence.  The close ups of sections of the costume suggest that the female is young. Her face looks tired and her make up is worn, this also adds to the enigma code as to what has happened to her. In addition to this emergent ideology is used by including boots and a coat in costume to show how we have not represented our female as a sexual object, this tells the audience she is a strong character, yet still vulnerable. The absent representation of men also adds to the enigma code as the audience wonder what has happened and why hasn't a male (residual ideology) saved her or is shown trying to help her.

The other locations we used were a big hallway making our female character look small, emphasising how vulnerable she looks. The way the girl runs in this shot shows panic and this long shot focuses on how the woman runs, representing emergent ideology because it makes the audience feel worried for her because she may not be able to protect herself as well as a male could.

The message we communicated by use of costume is that we are challenging stereotypical women in horror films as the eye make up is dark and the piercings and hair style is not fashionable. This represents emergent ideology as we are going against the typical, damsel in distress, femenine representations of females.

The titles are bold, in capital letters and not in female orientated colours therefore the film is obviously target mostly at males, males are seen as big, strong figures, so bold, capital titles attract males as this is our main target audience, as well as strong maybe 'tomboy-ish' females. This may represent the female as not very feminine because the sequence was obviously built to attract men to the horrible images not women to the characters femininity.