Representation in Our Opening Sequence By Sam K

This post will explore the way in which teenagers are represented in our opening sequence. It is essential that we keep our film as an up to date believable representation of the teenagers because they are our main target audience as well.

As teenagers ourselves we will aim to use all our knowledge of what the people we associate are like to represent people of our age group. The dominant ideology of teenagers is that they go out a lot, dress poorly wearing hoodies and tracksuits, are lazy and that they don't have a lot of emotion towards anything. As we know that this is not always the case we will aim to represent teenagers in a more favourable way as we feel this may not always be tHe case and these ideologies are slightly wide of the mark. However Anastasia and Damien will be binary opposite characters with the interest of representing different personalities within the same age group with an innocent girl who seems to have a perfect life and a quiet but devious boy who has a hidden agenda to cause trouble as the antagonist.
 
According to Steve Neale's theory audiences enjoy texts because of repetition and difference. We will aim to use the repetition element of this theory by representing teenagers in the same way that other films of this genre have because it seems like a bad idea to go completely against the way all the other films have gone considering their success.
 
Camera shots such as establishing shots might be useful in representing teenagers because there is an idea that because of teenagers lack of life experience they tend to create strong bonds with certain locations that mean something to them so a shot like this would be useful to emphasise the relationships they have with the place as well as showing what the place is like.

We will look to use music that highlights the latest fashion and also music that is fast pace and intense to show that certain things can really get teenagers blood boiling and so it would emphasise the intensity of how they are dealing with the situation they are in. If we elect to use dialogue then we should try to make sure that the characters speak with current slang and with a slightly relaxed, common dials because that tends to be how every teenager speaks when surrounded by their peers.
 
It is important that we use cutting as an editing technique because it shows the divergence of attention and short attention spans that teenagers tend to have and how quickly their focus switches from one thing to another. However the use of a two shot might also be effective in portraying how dependent teenagers are on each other especially when in a tricky situation, they rely on each other quite a lot.

The colours that are generally associated with teenagers tend to be darker and plain colours that aren't to vibrant because a lot of teenagers are associated with social groups that tend to follow the same trends as each other so in order to stay safe they tend to prefer plainer colours so therefore the costume and general colours in the opening sequence should be colours like white and black because it emphasises the dominant ideology that teenagers are generally quite simplistic people. To back up the point about simplicity it could also be useful to use simple and bold texts in credit sequences in order to keep going with the simple theme. Also low level lighting could be effective because of the genre of the film making the teenagers seem more intimidating because a baby faced teenager in bright lighting might be quite tame and won't run in unison with the genre of the film.