Q2-How does your opening sequence represent particular social groups?

It was important for us that we represented our social groups correctly and that our audience was able to identify them. When dealing with social groups you need to think about costume, make-up, movement, voice, dialogue and facial expression. Each aspect helps the audience to identify which social group a character belongs. There are many different types of groups, some you relate to a particular genre , for example you would expect a gangster to be in a crime-drama film. As we only included one character in our opening sequence we had to make sure that we represented extremely well as she would be only character the audience saw.

Costume is one of the main ways of linking a character to a social group. A piece of clothing can determine if they are an emo or if they are a Jockey. Our character belonged the social group of "popular girls" which meant she dressed well and looked good at every opportunity. To understand this more we took part in an experiment to see how easy this could be achieved. We had a pupil sit in a chair and slowly started to add different pieces of clothing on him. We started with a coat which seemed that looked old and dirty. Simply by adding a coat he no longer looked like a pupil but more like a rocker or even a tramp. We then added some stylish glasses onto him and took away the coat. The glasses transformed him into a cool kid who seemed to have an attitude. This experiment told us that we did not have to over dress our character to make them suit their social group. As our character belonged to the popular girls social group we needed to make sure she was wearing trendy, colourful clothing which would represent her love of life and family. As she is also stylish we made sure that her clothing was designer and that everything was equally proportioned.

Movement was another aspect which needed to be addressed with caution as a characters movement can be the key to their social group. The way a character walks , sits and stands all come under movement and it was important that we matched our characters movement to their social group. By looking at other social groups and the characters in which you associate them with we saw how they used movement to portray different groups. Take the character Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction. He walked with a swagger and attitude so straight away you could see he was a gangster. Another example would be Vito Corleone (The Don) from the God Father. In the opening scene he is sitting in a chair having a conversation, he is sitting up straight and his arms placed on the table. His body is open which suggests power and by him sitting up straight he is showing that he is higher than everyone else. We needed to use our characters body language to get the same results. Although the only movement our character performed was walking into the scene , picking the phone up and then dropping it will still needed to make sure the actions matched her social group. What we asked the actress to do is to walk in with her legs leading her body to represent confidence and elegance. By letting her legs lead her body the audience will be able to see that she is full of confidence and that nothing can get in her way. We also asked her to let the phone slip through her fingers when she drops it. What this suggests is that whatever was said over the phone it had pierced her self -esteem and her confidence, not only is the phone slipping through her fingers but so is her dreams.

We included dialogue in our opening sequence as we believed that this would be the biggest give away to her social group. Our dialogue was placed at the end of our opening sequence and was "little did I know this phone call would change my life forever, my hopes and dreams shattered in an instance". The dialogue was very dramatic and allowed the audience to see that our character was emotional and upset. Although her social group is "Popular Girl" we wanted the audience to understand that she was also very in touch with her softer side. Although we still wanted the audience to know that she belonged the popular girl social group so we decided she would she would speak with a melancholy tone. What this would do is show the audience that there are two sides to our character and that she is different form others in her group.