AS Media Studies

1. How does your media product
represent particular social groups?
By Katrina O’Connor

2. Young women are a key group
represented in this film
• The perspectives and ideas of young women
are under-represented in the media industry

3. Who is your favourite director?
• If you ask anybody who their favourite
directors are for example they will probably
tell you Spike Lee, Ken Loach or Martin
Scorsese.

4. Women Directors
• Jane Campion is a rare example of a high profile women
director for Bright Star about the poet John Keats.
• women directors do not feature often on the ‘big screen’.
• Young women are a key group in our film.
• this is a group whose perspective and ideas are under-
represented in the media industry.

5. Disability and Film
• This film also has a disabled protagonist.
• In most films featuring disabled people, their disability is
usually an important element of the story (My Left Foot for
example).
• In our film disability is avoided as an issue in the story line as
disabled participation in everyday life should be
unremarkable.

6. Viewer bias about women
• The film also asks the viewer to think about their preconceptions about
the vulnerability of young women.
• How will the audience expect a young woman to react to the dilemma she
finds herself in?
• Will they expect her to be ‘rescued’ by a male character? Will she be
‘helpless’?
• Challenging the gender stereotypes so successfully revisited in the series
‘Madmen’ is a very useful function of media production.

7. The Team
• The team creating this film also represent
multicultural Britain; being made by students
from immigrant communities ( I am of South
African and Irish background for example).