Evaluation Question Two

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

A range of social groups would be represented throughout our movie – the main one being the tired, depressed teacher. Although the same cannot be said for all teachers, majority have to put up with a lot of bad behaviour and students who are unwilling to work. Our movie, if it were to last around 90 minutes, would tackle the many issues that teachers have to deal with, in a perhaps very extreme scenario. We would have a series of flashbacks throughout the movie showing what exactly pushed our main character over the edge and what forced her to start killing off her pupils, including abusive students, pay cuts and all around stress. We chose to film with a female teacher as we wanted to be different, in most thrillers the killer ends up being male – we wanted to give our movie a twist. Therefore we are representing males and females as being very similar in the respect that BOTH genders are very capable of murder. However, the movie would not be biased. We would show her victims, the students, points of view also. The students would be represented in a variety of different ways, we would cover many of the modern stereotypes, for example the ‘chavs’, ‘popular girls’, ‘emos’ and so on. The film as a whole would tackle a wide spectrum of social groups.

I would compare the character of ‘the teacher’ to that of the knife-welding, mask wearing maniac from the horror movie ‘Scream’, directed by Wes Craven in 1996. The images below show our character, on the left, and the masked murderer from ‘Scream’, on the right. Although our character does not wear a mask, they do wear a dark hooded jacket like the character from ‘Scream’ so as to hide their identity. We could have put a mask on; however we thought that we would instead use camera angles that made it impossible to see the hooded figure’s face. In our film, the murderer acts as the main star, whereas whilst the film ‘Scream’ does mainly revolve around the murderer, he is not the protagonist. The characters body language is also very similar, they are both very composed and poised, standing confidently – people who are proud of what they are doing. The images above also show how similar the deadly instruments are that our characters used, the large butcher knives. However, the two characters actual motives for murdering are completely different. The murderer in ‘Scream’ turns out to be two of the main characters from the film, just two teenage boys. One has his own vendetta against the movies protagonist, the other is just ‘tagging along’, but neither of them have any real reason to kill off all of the people they slay. This differs to our character, who is killing her pupils because of  the trouble and anguish they have caused her, thus she has quite a valid reason for committing the murders.

By making the murderer the central focus of the film, we did not intend to glorify murder or suggest it is in any way good, we merely wanted to show things from the murderers point of view. Or even, the teacher’s point of view. We wanted to portray how unfairly some teachers are treated and how one day; they might even go over the edge.