Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The term representation refers to how an audience see things and relate to things. For example identity. The key markers are class, age, gender and ethnicity. Representation is how the identity is created through either text or a moving image (a film). Representation has other key aspects such as the actors themselves, lighting, camera shots, sound, editing, props, costumes and setting.            
The first screen grab is of the villain kneeling over the body of the victim. In the shot the light is lighting up the whole of the shot so everything can be seen. The light is coming from behind the camera which means the nothing is silhouetted. In the shot, you can see candles, a cone, the rug that the victim is on which has dust and dirt all over, suggesting that the rug has been there for a prolonged period of time, the rope tying the victim’s hands together, the bin bags covering the victim’s eyes and the villains mask.

To represent the ‘insanity’ of the killer, we made him pretend to dance with someone, whilst holding a bottle. It made him look weird and like he was insane. We also made him twitch at some points and there is also a scene where smashes the bottle.

We decided to use a male as the killer because we felt it’ll come across as more brutal and he may look stronger in a battle with a man. Whereas if a 5ft skinny woman was fighting a man, who was 7ft tall and had the build of a body builder,  it would look slightly unrealistic. We not discriminating a female killer, we just wanted to film to be as real as possible and not look faked. 

The villain - Hayden - is dress in a white shirt, black suit trousers and smart black shoes. This suggests that he takes pride in his appearance and makes up for the fact that no one can see his face by presenting his body in a smart and fresh way. Hayden is knelt over the victim’s body in a way that shows he has respect for him. This may show that he treats his victims with respect and thinks that they still judge him after they have died.

'V' from V for Vendetta is a very good comparison to Hayden in the way that he dresses smartly, wears a mask, and he kills. Both 'V' from VFV and Hayden wears the Guy Fawkes/ anonymous mask. The mask in both films is to protect the identity of the villain; although 'V' from VFV is actually the hero/protagonist. They both dress smartly. As you can see 'V' is dressed in smart protective clothing, whereas Hayden is dressed in a smart shirt and trouser with black smart shoes. It shows that both take pride in their appearance.

In INSANITY, the villain wears a mask that has been portrayed in the past decade as a hero's mask - VFV and the activist group Anonymous both wear it. The mask was originally the face of Guy Fawkes who can be portrayed as a hero by some, and is a villain to others. This may be anticipated by the audience as if Hayden is in fact good and could be a freedom fighter.

In INSANITY, we portrayed Hayden as a killer mainly through his actions of killing. But we also wished to portray Hayden as a villain on how scary he looked. We thought that the mask would have done this as if a hero wears a mask then it's normally friends, for example, Spiderman. Simple mask that wouldn't scare anyone in a dark alley. Whereas the Guy Fawkes mask is a mask that, since it's so creepy and mysterious, would be scary in a dark alley.

During the opening, there are several points were Hayden, the villain, is shown to be higher in the social hierarchy through the camera shots. This is done through the camera work by being at a low angle, this makes Hayden to appear a lot bigger than Connor, the victim.

We also represented Connor as the victim because simply he was dead. He had a large wound on his chest/stomach. We felt that the audience could clearly see that Connor is dead because of his wounds and his death like actions.