Evaluation question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Media products can represent different social groups such as teenagers, the elderly, rich and poor etc. In our product it is mainly teenagers that are focused on. The clothes that our main character is wearing would suggest that he is from a fairly modern, middle to upper class background. He is 17 years old and appears to have medium length hair. We did this as we felt that too many existing media products place extraordinary characters into unreal situations, we wanted to challenge this and so placed a very typical ordinary character into an unreal situation.

We also touched on the issue of a lack of social groups within the opening scene. The pub that Dan tries to enter is run down and locked, representing the breakdown of society due to the lack of social groups. Without adults to go to work, the country would shut down. We tried to create this world through imagery such as the run down pub and complete lack of traffic and people. The zombies featured in our final piece seem to be reasonably young adults. We did not do this for coincidence or because it was easier but because teenagers are often seen as rebellious and chaotic figures in society. We wanted to use that image to make the zombies appear more sinister and chaotic.

Whilst researching existing films that fit into the zombie genre we noticed that there were few times when children or teenage zombies were shown. We wanted to challenge this by using teenagers. In a different interpretation to teenagers being chaotic and rebellious they could in some cases show the purity of youth. By making the zombies appear to belong to this age bracket i feel that it makes them all the more disturbing; something meant to be pure and innocent turned murderous and animalistic. By choosing to show the zombies in this light it also makes the film controversial, making it spark a lot more interest in the media world among the viewing public.