Task 2- How does your product represent particular social groups?

“Elisabeth’s Diary” is about a teenage girl with some mental and social issues. She uses her diary as a way to release pain and anger. Although the film strongly realise on the horror aspect of the youth being murdered, it will also look into the stress and strains placed on teenagers everyday and how close some of them come to snapping and what happens to those who do. Another film that shows when a teenager snaps is in “the ring”, when a girl “goes crazy” and ends up killing her mothers horses and then is killed herself but comes back to life to kill more. In ours the girls’ diary kills people, she goes crazy, kills herself but the murders continue. Therefore both products represent mental health issues effecting teenage girls. In “final destination” there is a sense of audience anticipation, we as an audience know that when we are introduced to a character they are more than likely going to be killed off. We want to try and achieve that same level of audience anticipation in our film. Therefore we represented our characters death in the first scene because we wanted to build up the suspense and tension in the same way as “final destination”.

The “difficult of a teenager” is a popular theme for TV shows and movies. Television shows like “skins” and “sugar rush” also look in into the struggles of teenage life, with episodes that include themes like: sex, weight, popularity, sexuality, race, intelligence, money, drugs, drink, suicide, death, dysfunctional families and metal health. “Elisabeth’s Diary” will mainly cover popularity and mental health and how one impact on the each other. Teenagers in media are often portrayed in a bad light; our film will try to show all sides of the story to show that not all teenagers deserve the label they get stamped with. When I was coming up with the film I choose the protagonist to be a teenager because I am and therefore am going through some of the things which the character would. I also chose it to be based around teenagers as it makes the storyline more interesting and the cast would mostly be around the same age as the target audience. The protagonist in “Elisabeth’s diary” would be autistic. I did some research into Autism and its effects on teenagers, I thought the symptoms and how it makes people act fitted perfectly with the way we wanted to portray Elisabeth. Here is a few sections I found on autism which I thought explained why Elisabeth would act the way she does in our film.
· It is difficult for autistic children at any age, but the teenage years can be especially challenging. Autism is a disorder that manifests itself with the individual having trouble communicating and managing a variety of social situations. Coupled with this, there are the repetitive behaviours and difficulty with emotional control. The teen years are perhaps the most social time of our lives. It is a time where teenagers are learning about them selves, and are moving rapidly toward adulthood. This is an incredibly social time where what you say and how you act are very important in the eyes of your peers. This is also precisely the time where autistic teens face some of the most stressful situations of their young lives.
· It can be at this age that most teenagers become aware how different they are from their peers. They may notice that they don’t have many or any friends
· Autism causes a problem in communication; most autistic teens do not learn how to behave according to sociological norms through experience.
· The inability to fit into proper social situations can be traumatic and lead to a tendency to disengage from a certain situation, whether it is related to play, school, or work
Sourced from http://answers-about-autism.info/