Joel
Macauley
Reflecting
Analysis
This piece of work focuses upon the representation of British
teenagers in television, and whether they are positive or negative. The texts I
focused upon are The Inbetweeners (2008), This is England 86 (2010) and Skins
(2007), the reason I chose these programmes was because the representations of
teenagers in each show is different. As a result of this it gave me a lot of
content and different views to consider especially in my research essay.
Through my production I have decided to focus upon a negative representation of
teenagers as I have shown the teens on my DVD cover and poster as being
gangsters and being involved in violence.
The link between the research and production has come from
This is England because of the group being a gang type whom seem to go round
starting fights with other groups. This is shown in the scene where the characters
Woody, Shaun, Milky and Harvey have a fight against a scooter gang, this
reinforces the stereotype that This Is England looks at the negatives of
teenagers and shows them to be violent. Therefore I have decided to incorporate
this into my own production but in a more extreme fashion, the gangsters that
appear on my media product are a modern take on the This is England style of
gang but in a more extreme fashion. The messages in my practical reinforce some
of the negative stereotypes that have been explored in my research essay,
however just like all the negative representations of teenagers it doesn’t mean
that they are true for every teen. The reasoning behind me focusing upon the
negative representations is because it has a broader scope so therefore it has
given me more areas to explore and more to talk about. The photography used on the front cover of
the DVD and also on the accompanying poster I believe are ones that reflect the
negative representation of teens due to the way the cover stars are positioned
and also the looks on their faces. The research that I completed before I
started to make my product helped the process a lot as I looked at existing
products of the crime film genre which gave me ideas of how professional
products are made and how I could do my best to replicate it. However in one of
my other chosen texts which is The Inbetweeners it challenges the
representations that are shown in This Is England. The Inbetweeners focuses
upon teenagers who are non-violent and do not go looking for fights unlike the
characters in This Is England. In Series 2, Episode 2 one of the characters
(Simon) is attacked by a younger boy however, Simon does not retaliate to the
boy, this shows that the representations in The Inbetweeners move away from
violent negative connotations. Despite looking at these representations in The
Inbetweeners I decided to not base my practical around and decided to look at
more negative representations of teenagers.
Overall, there are various strengths and weaknesses of the
overall project. The weaknesses I believe include the standard of photography
on the DVD cover and poster which could be better however it was the best I
could do. Another weakness would be in the research essay and the lack of
examples from my 3 chosen texts. Moreover there are plenty of advantages, I
believe that the depth of detail I have gone in to looking at the
representations of teenagers not only just in my 3 chosen TV programmes but
also in other media forms such as newspaper articles it gave me more support
for my essay and gave a larger scope of analysis. The overall aim of the
project was to look at the various representations of teenagers and to
incorporate this into my own media product. Looking back over the project there
are things I would do differently such as studying my media texts more and also
I would try and find more examples of teenagers being represented positive in
the media.
