Evaluation Draft 2

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.