PLANNING: Characters

Social Groups Pinterest Boards

We looked at the different social groups and stereotypes that we wanted to incorporate into our foundation production, so that they were easily recognisable to our audience. 

I made Pinterest boards to individually represent the social groups involved in our narrative: sporty girls and stalkers, using stereotypical representations of each. This was extremely useful for our development and planning as we could clearly see the distinct visual styles and work out how best to represent them in our film opening. 

Through this process, key visual codes became apparent for each of the groups. My board on stalkers consisted of black and monochrome tones with dark lighting. Inspired by this, we decided we would use low lighting and the use of shadows when capturing shots of our stalker, to emphasise the unnerving, ominous feeling associated with the antagonist. In many of the pictures, the 'stalker' was pictured with a black hood up, resulting in a hidden identity - a key element we concluded we wanted to use in our narrative. 

We decided to represent our protagonist as a young, sporty girl. To put emphasis on the main focus of her character, sport, we will make sure that we choose costumes carefully to fulfil the stereotype through well-known branded sports clothing (e.g. Nike). 

Stereotypes are universally deemed useful by the media for many reasons such as helping the audience understand characters. Through stereotyping (with body language, costume etc.), visual shortcuts are created, allowing audiences to easily decode a character. They also help to build character relatability, in terms of empathy, sympathy and antipathy, as well as signposting audiences to the potential narrative based on stereotypical events. Finally, the use of stereotypes also help to reinforce genre expectations through allowing audiences to recognise stock characters. 

Stuart Hall is a sociologist and cultural theorist who wrote why stereotyping can also be negative and dangerous. He believed stereotyping creates 'groups' that can be recognised through negative features and that they imply these negative traits are 'natural' qualities that each member of a group has. For example, the stereotype that black men are lawless or blondes are dumb. This leads to what Stuart Hall called 'power circularity', meaning that powerful groups are the ones with the power to create stereotypes and exclude others from the elite list.