1. Q2: How does your media
product represent
particular social
groups?

2. Character representations
• I have made a blog post on my production blog about the typical representations of characters in
film noir, click here to check it out.
• Comparison of our characters to the typical film noir characters:
- As the typical femme fatale uses her seductiveness to manipulate men, we decided our femme
fatale would be like that as well, in our OTS you can tell their is an attraction between the femme
fatale (me) and our anti-hero (Danny). We decided to dress the femme fatale in tight clothing and
heels to make her look seductive, and we used low angles on her so that she would be looking up
through her lashes so that she constantly looked flirty, but also putting her in a vulnerable position
which reminds the audience that she is less powerful which is why she uses her appearance to gain
power.
- Our anti-hero is a typical, working class man. This may not be totally clear in the OTS but he does in
fact own the wedding dress shop, he’s a business man, who gets trapped by falling for the femme
fatale and trying to save her from her suffering relationship with the killer. He is someone our male
audience can relate to, as he is an ordinary man with flaws who wasn’t made to save the day and
fight crime. We made him dress in a suit to show he has some wealth and power as a business man.
His emotions are most often captured on camera across his face as he is a average man who shows
his emotions, and this also helps the audience understand that he has feelings towards the femme
fatale when he follows her to save her.
- The killer is predominantly known to be psychotic and ends up punishing both the anti –hero and
the femme fatale. Our killer has some psychotic qualities to him as he won’t allow the femme fatale
to leave him and be with someone she’s happier with, in result to this he ends up killing her. We
sometimes filmed the killer from low angles to emphasise him being psychotic an d having power
over the femme fatale.

3. Location
• Sophie did a blog post on our choice of location and I posted a link to it on my blog, here is the link to her post.
• Location for a film noir production is most often, dark and abandoned to make the characters seem more
vulnerable when they are there. Most film noirs are set in the 50s so the location is usually small and quaint
looking.
• Our choices of location:
Prince Street Elm Hill
• We chose to film some of it on a cobble street, because it was small and made it feel claustrophobic, so it made
the femme fatale look smaller and vulnerable on her own when she is running away from the killer. In the end
we chose Elm Hill because it had older shops on the street, this gave it more of a 50s feel.
• We chose to also film in Camilla Brides the wedding shop as my auntie part owns it so she said we could, and it
gave the anti-hero his business and helped the audience understand that the femme fatale and the killer are in
relationship and due to be married.

4. Mis-en-scene
• At the start of the year, we researched into the lighting and camera
angles for mis-en-scene of film noir, to find my blog post to those
click here.
• Our choice of location helped with lighting as the cobble streets
being small made them seem darker, and the wedding shop had a
lot of low lighting with the chandelier creating shadows across the
room, this kind of lighting gives the scene more of a tense
atmosphere, and there was a mirror in there which helped with
some interesting camera angles (I’ll talk more about this in the
props slide).
• The costumes were carefully arranged to represent typical film noir
characters, hence why our femme fatale’s outfit portrays her
attitude; seductive. And the anti-hero and the killer were both to
wear suits to show how effectively they have more power over the
femme fatale.

5. Props
• You can see all the props we originally planned to use in the blog
post that Sophie created with locations, I posted this link in my
previous slide.
• And in my Prezi for question 1, I mentioned something we had
excluded from our OTS and that was the gun as it seemed a bit
inappropriate to include just in case someone saw us using it while
filming and misinterpreted what we were doing.
• However, we did make sure the femme fatale was wearing red
lipstick to amplify her seductiveness.
• We used a mirror for one of the camera angles as they are featured
frequently in film noir films, and we used this to make it more
interesting and to show our creativeness, the mirror is used to show
a conversation between two people and it creates tension as to why
they won’t talk face to face.

6. Dialogue
• We wrote out our script and from this link you can see we decided to not
include much speech.
• We chose not to have much speech in our OTS as the scenes developing
on screen was enough for the audience to get an understanding of the
relationships between the characters and also create an enigma for them.
• Voice-overs are most often used to explain something or to contribute a
third perspective/third person into the story. We included a voice-over in
our OTS, this was to increase the enigma of the story, I said “I should learn
to control my weaknesses, I destroy everything I touch.” and this raises
questions from the audience as to what I mean. This follows the
representation of a film noir as they most often have enigma to entice the
audience to watch the whole film.
• The little bit of speech that we scripted into the wedding shop scenes was
just so the audience could understand why they were in that shop.

7. Semiotic representations through
sound
• One of the main semiotic representations through sound for film
noir is jazz music, originally we did have some jazz music playing in
the background of the opening credits for our OTS, if you look at
this post you’ll see the first YouTube video in it is the jazz piece we
originally added. However, we removed this after our first focus
group, which you can watch here, because we had to change some
of our opening credits which meant the music ended up only
playing for several seconds and it seemed slightly pointless having it
in there, you can look at the changes we made in this post.
• Another common semiotic representation is voice-overs, they are
used quite a bit in film noir’s because they set the mood. Which as
you can see in the previous slide, we included a voice-over in ours.

8. Semiotic representations through
symbols/icons
• The symbols of semiotic representations that we used in
our OTS that are commonly used, were things like red
lipstick and the gun. In my slide on props you can see about
props we used and if you click on this post, you’ll be able to
see the outfits we chose for each of our characters which
were carefully chosen for specific reasons.
• We didn’t mention in the blog post that I wore red
lipstick, which is typical for the femme fatale to wear, as it
draws attention to her lips which is iconic as she is meant to
be seductive and very attractive.
• Danny and Zach were told to wear suits to show off their
power, and to show off that Danny as the anti-hero is a
working class businessman.

9. Analysis of the locations
• In one of the previous slides about location I
mentioned our reasoning for the locations we
chose, and they went down well. We were able to
film without being disrupted and we were lucky
with the day we chose to film on Elm Hill as it had
rained earlier on in the day before we’d started
filming which meant that it gave the scene a
dystopian rain, which is conventional for film
noir’s. The cobble street made the running scene
more tense and frightening, it made you fear for
the character.

10. Analysis of the lighting
• I have also explained this in one of my previous slides,
another advantage of Elm Hill is that it is closely
compacted meaning the buildings loom over everyone
in the street, making it seem darker, this plays very well
on the lighting in the street, making it more mysterious
and effective on the audience as they fear what is
going to happen just like the characters in this scene.
• The lighting in the wedding shop scenes made it feel
more warm, which shows how comfortable/safe the
femme fatale felt with the anti-hero, it displayed the
warmth between them.

11. The target audience and how we
pleased them
• Mine and Sophie’s choice of target audience was a mix
between Impulsive Materialist and Impressionable
Socialites. Our main consumers are people who have heard
about the film from another, seen a trailer for the film and
enjoyed it, or who are going with their friends to watch it.
Click here to see my post on audiences.
• We have pleased our target audience by making it an OTS
that would interest a wide audience, their is enough
action, violence and seduction in the film to entice
men/boy, but there is also a romance story with emotion
that will interest women/girls. Although, we know these
aren’t the reasons for everyone as to why they would enjoy
our OTS.

12. Audience theory
• There are 3 theory’s:
• Propp’s theory; - the villain.
- the hero (he/she seeks something,
motivated by an initial ‘lack’).
- the donor (provides an object with magical
property).
- the helper who aids the hero.
- the princes (the reward for the hero).
- her father (who rewards the hero).
- the dispatcher (who sends the hero on his
way).
- the false hero.
• Strauss’s theory; - argued that so-called societies share similar elements.
Strong Weak
Romantic Emotionless
Funny Dull
Mature Childish
• Equilibrium’s theory; - this says that all stories about the fight to return to normality, an event happens and
everything after the event is about the attempt to return to normal or ‘equilibrium’.
• I think that our OTS fits best with Propp’s theory, as it’s most similar to our characters. For example, we have a
villain, a hero who seeks to have the femme fatale which he doesn’t have, and then the femme fatale is a reward
to him but she isn’t just given to him by another person so this challenges the theory.