Task 2 - How does your product represent particular social groups?

The product my group and I created shows a very niche social group: international high status gangsters. Whether they are men or women it is obvious that the poker players have high status, this has been created through mise en scene, costumes and lighting. Costumes were very important as in a film we can truly judge a persons character by their clothing. To give off the right impressions about our actors; we ensured their suits were sharp and their hair was either gelled into a side parting or wearing a hat. Interestingly we decided collectively as a group to challenge the stereotypical beliefs of the audience. Like other typical poker type thrillers there is an oriental guy, a Nigerian guy and a few Russians, these nationalities are always portrayed as “the bad guys”. Although at first glance our characters may be the obvious actors for their roles, second glance shows the people you though were Russian are actually from Ukraine. The oriental looking man is actually from Korea, this shows that you can judge a person by their appearance. We show the audience that actually no ethnicity is particularly worse then the other.
Media products represent social groups as extreme; it’s almost as if you have to be part on one of the known roles. Take a college for example; modern day media says that there will be set groups like jocks, cheerleaders, emo’s, geeks etc. Although the group of people we chose would not usually be in a useual high school movie as children. They could perhaps been included in the private lives children perhaps making them drop off drugs or fight other people. We thought it would be interesting to shoot a movie where we follow their lives.