Representation Question

Looking at my AS film opening 'Fixation' we used a stereotypical representation of teenagers. During the opening we featured teenagers at a house party, the teenagers were seen drinking, laughing and having a good time. In post production we added a strobe effect to create a sense of distortion for the audience, this allows the audience to feel almost as if they are at the party. Our target audience for our film opening was teenagers so we used the party to allow our audience to feel a sense of self representation. Cohen's theory represents different media groups as a whole, in our opening we did not present teenagers as a population in a positive light, we showed underage drinking and loud parties as the only thing that teenagers do. Also it shows a tweet that James sent out about his party, which represents that teenagers are not sensible when it comes to sharing private information online.

As there is no dialogue throughout our opening sequence we used the facial expressesions of our teenage actors to represent teenagers, throughout the opening sequence the teenages are shown laughing and smiling which represents as a whole teenagers are care free and happy.

We used our film opening as a way to subvert to stereotypes of gender that are seen in forms and conventions of stereotypical 'stalker' films. Usually you would see a man that is obsessed with a woman but we challenged this idea by having a teenage boy being stalked by an older woman. This makes our film opening rather controversial and original. The first character that we see in the opening is Eileen she is sat infront of a board that is covered in information about James. The lighting is very dark and the main focus is the board. By showing Eileen in dark lighting represents her personality. Also we used costume to represent the two characters personalities, using the binary opposition theory, Eileen is dressed in all black where as James is dressed more colourful, representing that Eileen is miserable and alone whereas James is happy. The use of binary opposites allows the audience to follow two different characters and see how they interact with eachother, which makes it more interesting and entertaining for the audience. We used costume and lighting to represent Eileen's personality as we chose not to show her face in the opening sequence as we wanted this to be the main enigma code throughout the first half of the film, it allows the audience to create an image for themselves of what they make think that Eileen looks like.

Although in contrast to this Eileen is conforming to stereotypes as stereotypically women are obsessed with males and male attention and this is what she is doing, trying to get the attention of a male. McRobbie looked at how men and women are portrayed in the media, Eileen conforms to her theory by being subversive to males although in contrast to this Eileen subverts to McRobbie's theory as she started that women are portrayed as weak whereas in our film Eileen is the villain and has the upper hand towards the male.

Sound was a key part in making Eileen appear to be a villain, when we first see Eileen the music is eerie and continues to be throughout the opening sequence, the use of tracking shots and quick cuts mean that the audience are following Eileen's everymove drawing them in.