Question 2

Ethan

Question 2.

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

A. In our media product we focused massively on portraying our character as a 'psychopath' suffering from mental illness and this is the cause behind his behaviour. Mental health is obviously a sensitive subject so we extremified the characteristics of our killer to push him further away from a 'normal' mental health patient in society, to make his acts that much more horrific and extreme.

We decided to use mental health as a focus for our psycho's behaviour not to give him an excuse for killing, but to implement a killers perspective for the audience, helping to create a relationship between the two, and creating a far wider range of emotions and feeling within the audience.

We used concealing camera shots and close ups of his torso, to show a hidden aspect to a camera, and almost make him seen invisible, this could be argued to resonate with mental health patients in society as they are often hidden away in institutions few have heard of or visited, obviously this is not the case always but we felt that if we made the character appear like an outsider to the community it would resemble authentic traits of somebody suffering with a mental health condition. Also we used elements of mise en scene such as his costume, which we thought a natural archetype of a psychotic killer would be to have something 'off' about his appearance, so we decided to dress him overly formally so that to add a professional edge to what he is doing.