Main Task - Post 12.2 - Question 2

How does your media product represent particular social groups?

For this post we are asked to show how the characters that we portrayed in our film contrast with famous actors from our chosen genre of action, and so from our main film I have taken a few screen grabs of two of the characters in costume in comparison to two famous actors from the action genre.

Firstly I have grabbed a picture of James Bond, seeing as he is such an iconic figure in action we wanted to replicate his image by creating a character like him, so we made 'Dwain Jefferson'. Danny in our group opted to play 'Dwain'. We took many things into consideration before shooting, unlike in our preliminary task we wanted to make the characters believable in their roles. We researched in Post 4 of the main task what it actually took to become a 'secret agent' like James Bond.

In comparison to James Bond we have Danny as 'Dwain Jefferson'. We wanted Danny to look smart and authorititve, this is clearly shown as he bursts through the door and grabs me playing 'Vinnie' with his suit on. James Bond is known for his spectacular entrances but clearly we could not replicate some of his stunts on the school premises. 

In similar contrast to Danny and James Bond, we needed to make myself, Ben and Charlie believable in our roles as we looked to portray a mafia squad. Similarly to our research into James Bond for Danny, we looked at what it would take to play a mafia squad. Looking into that, we found originally that a mafia squad are incredibly similar to american gangsters. American gangsters recently featured in their own film (gangster squad) and so we looked to inspiration from them.

In comparison to the american gangsters, we looked to play convincing roles just like them. In the screen grab from our film 'Poker Face' you can see that we are all dressed differently, I am dressed in a plain white shirt, black trousers and black tie, Ben (middle of picture) is dressed in black trousers, shirt and braces, and then Charlie (right of frame) is dressed in black trousers, white shirt, bow-tie and top hat. We all took on different costumes to differ ourselves from one another, much like in the film 'Gangster squad' (picture above).


To conclude
The mafia squad - we all dressed accordingly to try and play convincing roles, I felt we achieved that. I felt that we portrayed  the mafia squad as tough, aggressive and authoritative. Much like the typical american gangsters like 'Al Pacino' from 'The Godfather' or 'Ryan Gosling' from 'Gangster Squad'
'Dwain Jefferson' - I felt Danny played a convincing role considering he was only in the shot for a matter of seconds, he comes in and instantly gives this 'dangerous' feel to him. He plays a mysterious and demanding role a lot like a 'James Bond' figure or even 'Bryan Mills' from 'Taken'