Main Task Opening 'Depletion' - Evaluation Question Two

How does your media product represent particular social groups?:

How our product represents the younger demographic:

Our media project represents the younger demographic through the usage of our protagonist being a teenage female. This makes our piece more relatable to our target audience, (Certificate 15) as they can relate to certain emotions the protagonist is feeling. 

How our product represents stereotype roles of authority in society:

It is also representative of The Mafia (Rebecca), with this trope evident through Rebecca's character the guard and the possession of guns, in coherence with the shady nature. 

How our product represents feminism:

The female protagonist and antagonist would be a popular choice due to the role reversal of typically male roles, which represents the wishes of feminist social groups in society.

Our media product purposefully challenges gender conventions of real media products of the action genre, through our decision to cast the protagonist as a female in a genre that is over-represented by men harboring lead roles. 

An action film is defined as a film in which a protagonist/protagonists end up in a series of challenges, which typically include violence, physical feats and fighting with the inclusion of frantic chases. Evidently from this depiction of the genre, one can decipher that a male is likely to be cast as a protagonist in an action film, due to the stereotype of a male being strong, brave character who possesses the ability to fight; unlike a female who is deemed weaker and unable to fight for herself, which is then shown through the femme fatal role females play in many high-grossing blockbusters such as the  James Bond films. (Bond Girls) Therefore in our media product, we wanted to challenge this convention which we set about doing through incorporating a 'frantic chase' and 'physical feat' whereby our protagonist was tied up in rope and had the initiative to escape. Our actor Emily successfully portrayed the will power and strength Hayden's character has, which displayed the high capability of females to fight for themselves and the 'mental strength' that allowed her to escape challenges, which puts her on par with her male counterparts. Another convention relating to gender roles we broke was using a female actor as a guard, which is again viewed in the film industry to be more of a masculine role. 

Through our film, we were attempting to shed a new light on female strength and independence, in order to develop the new concept of 'feminism' in film and particularly the Action Genre. As throughout history, there has been a prejudice against females in Hollywood. I wanted to do this for various reasons, one being that as a student who has aspirations to work in the film industry in the future, as the director I wanted to evoke to the audience the potential for women to challenge gender roles and encourage others to do the same; as this encouragement will begin to relay to the film industry if enough action films are created showing the abilities of women. I also wanted to make sure our short wouldn't fail the Bechdel Test (a test of gender bias) which states that a director must abide by 3 rules: it has to have at least two women in it, who (2) who talk to each other, about (3) something besides a man.

We also subverted a convention within the Action Genre, whereby women (who are stereotypically the prize or femme fatal in an action film) are viewed by the audience through Laura Mulvey's male gaze principle; these are shots that view women from a close-up, usually low-angle in an attempt to sexualise them. 

Other products that have similarly used a female protagonist include Laura Croft Tomb Raider, Momentum and The Hunger Games, which were all major hits in the Box Office and of the same genre to our film, which shows that using a female protagonist is highly popular. (The Hunger Games grossed $677,923,379.)