Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

When we began to develop and plan our characters, we had to consider representation of each character carefully. Our overall aim was to create representations as realistic as possible, and to make sure not every character was stereotypical, some had stereotypical features but the characters were also unique in some way, breaking boundaries and making the characters easy for the audience to relate to. Our key areas of interest were the representation of age, ethnicity and sexuality. 

Our chosen genre; a black comedy with themes of revenge was chosen because we believed it was relevant to a contemporary teen audience. Teenagers often easily get jealous or angry with eachother, whether it's over betrayal, boyfriends or friends and they want the person that hurt them to feel hurt too. However whilst this is reflected in our opening sequence we have also shown that this can go too far and throughout the film we would go on to show how much it affects others and how it is not the way to sort out problems. 
 
Age

In teen dramas, such as Skins, teenagers are often represented as young adults who have not found themselves yet; they are unsure of themselves, mixed up with drugs, alcohol and sex and are often seen as rude, irresponsible and self centered - they care more about themselves than their family or their friends.

In our opening sequence, the use of drugs is represented and as our first shot is a point of view show of someone on drugs and we have used the echo effect from Adobe Premiere Pro to give the sequence a surreal and realistic feeling, with double vision and a warped sense of time experienced by the audience. We have used a negative representation of teenagers, but we have also represented the use of drugs as negative, as Hanna overdoses and collapses due to the use of drugs. By representing drugs negatively we also managed to get a 15 certification for our opening sequence meaning we could widen our audience.

Although we have represented teenagers and drugs negatively overall, we have also shown everyone at the party to be getting on well with one another; they are all friends and do not judge one another. When Hanna overdoses most people are worried about her and start panicking, showing that teenagers are there to help their friends.

Sexuality

Homosexuality is often a major stereotype in all films, especially teen dramas. Homosexual characters want to keep their sexuality a secret and feel insecure due to their sexuality.

We planned to break stereotypes about sexuality, because the representation of sexuality is currently quite unrealistic in films and TV programmes such as in Skins. Maxxie is represented as a quite feminine boy, who dances and is quite self conscious of his sexuality. This is an out of date view of sexuality and homosexuality is now increasingly treated like heterosexuality. We have therefore represented homosexuality more realistically and this is shown by the clip of Joe and Patrick, where they are both dressed in their own style but not feminized in any way. The fact they are homosexual is not emphasised and each male is given their own unique personality traits; one as a alternative male, who is very worried about Hanna when she overdoses and the other a very casual male, laid back and only interferes with Hanna when Joe calls him over. Patricks noticed Eve leave whilst no one else did, showing him to also be clever and perceptive.

Gays are overly stereotyped, compared to females. Gays have much more attention brought to them, so we chose to focus on the representation of a gay couple rather than a female couple. However females can also be represented negatively, for example Naomi in Skins is uncomfortable with her sexuality and will not admit that she is a lesbian because she is afraid of what people might think.

We have represented a homosexual and a heterosexua couple to keep up to date and be realistic of society.

Ethnicity

Ethnicity, like sexuality is also often represented unrealistically. In Skins series 1 there is only 1 coloured boy in series 1 and 2 - a Muslim called Anwar. He is represented quite stereotypically with strict parents, who want him to do his best at school and put pressure on him. They also make Anwar go to the mosque to pray, sometimes against his wishes. Many themes running through Skins also run through our film opening so we have done lots of character research on Skins. In series 3, a black boy, called Thomas is introduced who is also stereotyped as he has been sent over from Africa for a better life.

Our representation of ethnicity was based on our research into ethnicity in dramas. We used a range of ethnicity to show an up to date view of modern society. It is much more cultured, mixed and varied than ever before and we needed to reflect this in our opening sequence as one of the key areas of representation. We have Ama - black and Meera - Sri Lankan and each character is unique. Everyone is given equal screen time to show that everyone is equal.

The representation of ethnicity is film dramas is often outdated, stereotyped and unrealistic so we broke convention on this representation issue in order to make it more realistic and believable, especially to our audience, part of multicultural society.

Here is a clip, showing Anwar in Skins and the stereotypical way that

his Muslim parents treat him.