Question 2: How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The social group that our opening is trying to represent is that of young, geeky, gamer geeks who are socially awkward or perhaps come across as a bit weird to the majority of people. We manipulated multiple things to do this in multiple ways but the main ways are costume, setting and action codes.

Costume
Our decisions for what 'Guy' should be wearing were heavily influenced by 'Will' from The Inbetweeners and 'Jim' from American Pie.

Costume Decisions

• We went for a hawaiian shirt as we felt it was really ugly and completely fitted the look we were going for
• The cargo shorts were common for characters similar to ours so we felt this was a must have for 'Guy'
• The long socks looked wrong both in terms of colour and height which is why we chose to use them
• The shoes didn't match the colours Guy was wearing at all
• The whole costume for Guy was a complete mix of colours that didn't match in the slightest

The costume we resulted in

Setting

The set of The Big Bang Theory

• We noticed that The Big Bang Theory's set had an abundance of scientific equipment, games and figurines.

Setting Decisions

• We felt that our setting needed to reflect Guy's interests and therefore had game posters, game cases, an Xbox and a game calender in shot.

Guy's posters and games in shot

The game calender

Action Codes

• This clip among many helped us to conclude that social awkwardness was quite common within characters similar to ours.

Action Code Decisions

• We felt we could go to one of two extremes for Guy to be socially awkward, the first was he would pretty much ignore Bella and the second was that he would be so over the top with her, that he would show how awkward he was
• We settled on the second option and had Guy shaking hands with Bella, which is quite uncommon for a first date, however, the way he does it too further portrays the awkwardness