I am going to discuss theories of representation in relation to my foundation portfolio, which was a thriller opening called "mind games". My group decided to adopt a crime thriller in our opening after looking at some existing media texts such as The Shining and Se7en and we decided to target the 18 to 25 year old age group of both male and female. We came up with this decision because of our audience research.
In terms of gender, we adhered to representations by using two males to play the antagonist and protagonist roles. This stereotype, that the protagonist and antagonist roles are played by men, is common for thriller films. We used Rahul as the antagonist and dressed him up using props and costumes e.g. old tattered clothing to show his roughness. This was done to give meaning to the audience, through the use of mise-en-scene, that Rahul is the antagonist of our thriller film. We also used dark, gloomy lighting whenever Rahul was shown on screen, linking this lighting to darkness and evil, further emphasizing Rahul's role as the antagonist. An example of this would be when Rahul is sitting on his bed smoking a cigarette; there was minimal lighting and the room was perfectly lit to convey the meaning my group wanted.
The protagonist role, a policeman played by myself, was represented through the use of a typical policeman's costume, badge and hat. The camerawork used when filming the policeman in action was typically high angles to help sympathise for him, however there was no close ups to fully show that he is the protagonist and whether or not he will last long in the film. This was one of my weak points in our thriller opening. Parallel editing was also used to create a narrative that the policeman was after the psycho killer. This also helped establish the character roles and also allowed my group to implement a cliffhanger enigma code in our thriller opening. It left questions to be asked such as "Who will survive out of the two?" or "Is the policeman going to the right house?". This is important for the audience as it keep's them wanting to know what will happen next and wanting to go to the cinema to watch our thriller movie.
"Stereotypes are a label that involves a process of categorization and evaluation", a quote by O'sullivan et al from 1998 about representation. He believes that stereotypes can be shorthand to a narrative because such simplistic representations define our understanding of media texts, for example we know who is good and who is evil. In relation to my thriller opening, this can be applied as it is due to the stereotypes and semiotics of a villain doing wrong, e.g. smoking and having a knife, that the audience can understand. representations and therefore define their understand of my thriller opening. My representations might be read in an ideological way. The audience may read, through my representations, that the antagonist is the psycho path. However for the protagonist, my group were not clear as to whether the policeman will last the opening of our thriller as he does not seem to look like the actual protagonist, due to the lack of close ups and him being alone without any weapons.
My group also included Propp's theory on character roles. We included a villain which was the psychopath. However, one main character role which was not clearly established was the hero. There was no clear antagonist as mentioned before due to the lack of close ups etc., so here is another weakness of our thriller opening. Also, the inequality of men and women was also portrayed in our opening as the two characters on screen were both men, further emphasizing the stereotypical character roles in a thriller of a patriarchal society.
In conclusions, I believe that me and my group did use simple representations and do reinforce dominant ideologies to allow the audience to make sense of them.
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