For our film 'Rivals', we intended in representing all of the characters under the stereotypical view of what is known as the 'working class', in order to gain the full effect of what a British Social Realism film looks like. Especially because of the fact we explored the themes of 'violence' and also touched slightly on 'the corruption of youth' as our opening sequence involves gang rivalry and violence. In terms of camera angles we intended in making the three main gang members appear as dominant as possible through the camera shots, including various mid shots, which show the characters body language; at ';0;09' we can see the three gang members walking through the field with their hands in their pockets, with straight faces, not showing any emotion or sense of weakness, this connotes the seriousness the characters are enforcing when, going to attack George later on in the opening sequence. Furthermore this dominance suggests that these working class teenagers hanging around in gangs, think they are powerful, and above the law, as they resort in violence when they do not get there way. In terms of establishing shots, these were used to show the council estate flats, connoting the working class area. Council estates, are used a lot in contemporary British Social Realism films such as; 'Kidulthood', 'Adulthood', 'Shank' and 'Ill manors', this is typically where these teenagers hang round and cause trouble. These variations of Mid shots that we used; allows the audience to view and analyse the individual gang members costumes, seen at '0:53', here we can see that two of the gang members on the left Keshav and Matthew, both have their hoods up, suggesting they do mot want their identity to be revealed, especially Keshav as he keeps his head down, connoting that he has a bad reputation and has some sort of notorious gang background.
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| Mid shot, showing characters costumes (0:53) |
Mise en scene & Sound
Costumes and props were used when making our film. The reason for this is because it reveals the personality of the characters. Most BSR films use ordinary people in their films in order to make it realistic as possible. So when filming our BSR opening we want our characters to come off as realistic as possible by wear normal everyday clothing that people in the particular location we are setting it in would wear. This represents particular social groups, manly young teenagers that a still in secondary education. This is typically clothing that isn’t fancy or expensive. They would be wearing clothes like jogging bottoms, hoodies, body warmers and trainers.
The type of music we are going to use will probably be rap / RnB since that is what these characters would typically listen to. This then makes the audience more interested since the viewers (who are mainly 15 - 25 year olds) would listen to this type of music so they can relate thus making them more engaged. The music will also be played as non - diegetic sound as gang is breaking into the house. The rest of the film will mainly be diegetic sounds as well as scenes where music would be playing through the radio.
Style and Iconography
Throughout the production of our film we knew we were going to enforce stereotypical views of teenagers. We did this through the use of the style and iconography. This is the science of identification, description, classification, and interpretation of symbols and themes. We felt challenging stereotypes would be too difficult in terms of relating the characters to our target audience. The main characters can clearly be seen as being the archetypal gang members through there costume mainly. They are wearing tracksuits and hoodies which are typical of gang members as they do not want their identity to be known. This supports the stereotype that is associated with teenagers in general and especially with gang members. If we were to of challenged the representation of this social group, we could have chosen for the characters to dress smart and classier. This would be similar to organizations like the mafia or people like the Kray twins, instead of dressing in cheap tracksuits they dressed in suits in order to show power and wealth as well as self-respect. But then this would not have represented the working class which is a convention of British Social Realism, so again another reason why we stuck to the stereotype.
In terms of representing the characters as being working class, this was mainly seen through the location we used to film. It was a block of flats situated between a main road and allotments. We feel this gave of the impression of little in terms of money. Flat blocks are a typical location seen time and time again in BSR films ( 'Kidulthood', 'Fish Tank', 'Sket 'etc.) so we felt it was appropriate to use them in our opening. We couldn’t really challenge this as it would not be conventional of a BSR film
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