Evaluation- Representation of Social Groups

Representation

As there are only two characters in this piece, very few social groups have been represented. Our opening involves a young adult Caucasian female and a Caucasian male in his mid-twenties. In terms of gender this is fairly representative of the general population, although it does not represent people who do not fit into the gender binary. In terms of race and age this is not very representative of the whole population as it pretty much only represents Caucasians in their early/mid-twenties.

The spy:

When deciding the character of the spy, we wanted to stick to genre conventions which generally involve a 30-something year old Caucasian man. This character is used because it represents the sort of person the film is targeted towards, as action/thrillers are generally targeted towards young men. This can be seen in a multitude of spy films, including very famous ones such as James Bond films, Mission: Impossible, and the Bourne series. We tried to make our character as close to this as we could, although we had a fairly limited selection of people to choose from. As a result we cast Oliver as a spy, even though he was slightly younger than the 'typical' spy.

The assassin:

I was the role of the assassin. Our main debate about the assassin was about gender, as the gender of assassins in movies is quite varied. In the past, killers have almost always been male - however, in recent times there has been a huge influx in the number of female assassins, although there is still variation in gender. In films like the Bourne series, for example, assassins are male, whilst in others, such as Kill Bill, assassins are female. In the end we decided to go with female. I was chosen as the assassin partly due to the fact I was available and willing to act. Female assassins often seem to be more mysterious and dangerous compared to male ones (this is evident in films such as Kill Bill where the women come across as more aggressive, this is probably played by the stereotype "men are the stronger sex, women are nurturing") thus making it seem more exciting and fit into slightly more modern action-thrillers. 

Age and ethnicity:

In terms of age and ethnicity, our film is not very representative. Both of the actors are young adults, and both are Caucasian. However, there are reasons for these choices. As for age, we decided that using fairly young actors made sense, for both spies and assassins the jobs are quite active and dangerous, therefore requiring younger people. The level of risk means that older people are less likely to survive and their experience would make them more likely to have jobs in organisation or leadership. Therefore don't fit the convention in using young adults exactly.

However, for ethnicity we decided to stick to genre conventions in our choices. The genre conventions of action/thrillers is to have Caucasian actors as the main parts. Some examples of this would be James Bond and Jason Bourne in terms of spies and Mad Max, Die Hard and Taken in terms of action/thrillers generally. In all of these, the main protagonist(s) are white. As well as this, in the context of the film it makes sense to have Caucasian actors considering it's set in England where the vast majority of the population are white. It therefore makes sense to use Caucasian actors in our opening.