Evaluation Question 4 – How does your media product represent particular social groups? - James Bolton

         In our film, we have both challenged and supported the traditional representation of social groups. Our main character, Ryan Marshall, the victim who has been abducted is a young male, so we casted this role to fit that. He is not a child but a young adult, as stated in our first shot in the news reporter’s dialogue he is 19 years old. An adult male is also a victim in Saw 1, as you can see in the screenshot. By making a strong male a victim of physical harm, it strengthens the representation of our unknown threat as he himself becomes more dangerous by his ability to capture a fully-grown man. A lot of victims in horror films are female, as they are stereotypically vulnerable and represent a ‘damsel in distress’ image. We have challenged this, which strengthened the position of the villain.

            We also used mise-en-scene to accommodate these representations and in particularly with the use of make-up. Below is a test make-up shot that we did in post-production. We engraved ‘Behind You’ on the victims arm, to show how vulnerable he his as the villain is commanding him and appears to already have a plan laid out for the victim.

When we screened the film to our class in an early stage of post production, we got a positive response and people thought that our casting for the main role was good. They were told to grade certain sections of our film out of 10 and under the "Mise-en-scene appropriate for the horror film' which includes the make up featured above, we achieved an average score of 8.25 which shows we have been successful in representing groups effectively using mise-en-scene.