2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

It is important for all media products to include typical representations, in order for the audience to relate to them and also to know what to expect from a particular representation. Films should also involve challenges to typical representations, e.g. Rocky Balboa who is an old man, however still proceeds to partake in professional boxing matches and is still quite nimble.

In 'Cataclysm' we used profession as an important representation. The soldier is represented as tough, ruthless, emotionless and important; this is conveyed by his emotionless shooting of an innocent half-dead body and his fairly slang/limited language. On the other hand, the Forensics appear much more afraid by the incident and they are portrayed as weak and fairly useless, they end up just walking into their insignificant deaths. These are fairly common stereotypes and in most cases the soldier will have/maintain authority (status).

A problem we achieved with our sequence is that we are A-Level students and arranging adults as actors would be incredibly difficult. However, the actors had to seem old as a soldier should probably be an adult and forensics are generally particularly old as they have worked hard to get where they are and they normally have climbed the ranks of their profession. This could be an example of a challenge to typical representation; however we ensured that we casted tall and mature actors (luckily for us, both Matt and I are tall and look fairly old).  

To help exaggerate the maturity of the soldier and forensics we ensured that the actors spoke in a monotone way and used relevant terms, such as 'Sitrep' and 'M.O'. These are necessary as the young actors need to appear educated and experienced.

Another representation we included was ‘Gender’. This is illustrated by the fact that the soldier in particular is male (plus also the forensics). The only female featured in our opening sequence is shown as a dead body. It is extremely rare for the protagonist of a military film to be female and this is why we casted a male soldier, because it could be distracting and give a weaker/less effective appeal if the protagonist of the sequence was female.