Essay - REPRESENTATION

For my advanced portfolio, as a group we produced a short film aimed to raise awareness about using mobile phones whilst driving. The short film is targeted at teenagers and young adults because from doing research we found out that this was the age group that was involved with road accidents when using mobile phones. We decided this would be a good idea for a short film as similar products like the Th!nk adverts have been very successful, but creating a short film about the topic was a little bit more in-depth and hadn’t been done before.

Because our target audience was teenagers and young adults we knew that we needed to make our product relate to them, so the characters we used were in the same age group. We also knew that to keep the target audience interested we needed to include some shocking action; which was a young child being run over. We used different types of technology to make this effective including a special HD camera that allowed us to use slow-motion. Similar to the Th!nk adverts, we showed two different version of a story to show the horrible effects of what can happen if you text whilst you drive, and the alternative being that this doesn’t happen if you just pull over to read the text. In-order to represent the youth in our film, helping to relate to our target audience, we dressed our characters in clothes that a lot of the youth are seen in (jeans and a hoody). We also made our teenage character that drives into the child drive a small hatchback car, which are very popular styles of car with the youth. We also made our Mum character wear more sophisticated clothes and an apron to help represent her character. However we could of used an older actor to help represent the Mum, as the only actor we could get was very young. By having a young mother we do think that it made the audience feel more sympathetic towards her when the police have to tell her that her son has been killed as the audience can relate to her more and feel her pain more. In order to represent the police well we dressed them in police uniform and use angled shots and lighting to give them power and authority. To represent the child we dressed him in a school uniform and made him bounce a ball along the road. Getting a good representation of the child was extremely important as we needed the audience to feel sympathy when he gets ran over.

Overall we used a range of characters and dressed them and used camera angles to help represent them. Doing this helped to tell our story and to also get the audience feel emotionally involved and related to the short film. However we could of used an older actor for the mother, but overall we think we did well to represent each character well to help show our story and connotations.

(I didnt really understand what to do because I didnt actually have a question to answer)