How does your opening sequence represent particular social groups?

Our two main characters are Ben and Tiffany: this is clear from our narrative as they are the two in most of the scenes and have most of the dialogue. Our narrative was written around these two characters. These two characters are at the opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to popularity in their school.
Tiffany is the popular one with friend and followers and she is represented as our plastic girl, through her dialogue, body language, the way she looks, position on frame, and props. Ben is represented as our geek/inferior characters though his dialogue, the way he looks, body language and props.

Tiffany is very similar to the Regina George character who was the main mean girl in “Mean Girls” because she also was a teenager in secondary school, who had two followers/friends who hung on her every word.
Tiffany s represented as the most important and a girl with authority and power by low angle shot of her looking up, this displays authority and power she amounts her peers in her school because in our opening sequence she is the only one who has a shot of this type. Her importance is represented through several single shots of her in the centre of the frame. One of these shots is a personal favourite of mine, it is the shot where you see tiffany walking in the corridor and the camera zooms out from her shoes to a long shot of her walking towards the camera and the camera follows her with a pan then a cut to another shot, this shows how pretty and well groomed she is like Regina George was land like Bell was in beauty and the beast. This is the 1st time we reveal her face and who she is, in contrast to her 2 best friends Amy and Tia where there identity is revealed in the 1st shot of them.


The fact that tiffany has most of the links in our narrative and the opening sequence what she says is just as important as the way she speaks. Her dialogue represents her as a spiteful, mean and insensitive character very similar to Megan Vandegeld from “white chicks” that is from a high social class than most and has a house in Beverly Hills and is the envy of all her peers and like Regina George and Tiffany.
In our opening sequences tiffany says “I don’t care watch where you’re going next time” and her friends say “yeah” in sync, “roll on, I don’t want people seeing you near me you geek” and friends laugh. This shows her insensitivity through the phrase “roll on” she can clearly see that he is in a wheel chair and she does not care and just speaks to him like he is a second citizen. This one of the issues we wanted to address in our narrative and help the audience see, because disabled people are treated as second class citizens in today’s society and displaying it our film can help the audience identify with him and sympathise with him. Also it pushes us towards our specification of modernising a fairy tale as we brought current day issues into our production. Tiffany and her friends are represented as plastic girls through their props as amid shot shots shows them all with makeup and the mirrors and Tia is looking at her nails as the others check their appearance.
Her posting in the frame is very important also. She is put in the front of her twp friends showing she is the most important and she is the one with the most authority in her group as she is at the front and in the centre.

Ben’s character can be likened to napoleon dynamite and he has no friends and spends most of his times in books and involved in “geeky” activities, like multiplayer games on the internet ECT. Just like Ben as he is the only one who attends his own book club and we can see him logging off from a computer in an empty classroom in our opening sequence.
There is a high angel over the should shot looking down on Ben which represents him as an inferior character to tiffany and he doesn’t keep eye contact with her showing he is almost afraid of her, which is contrast to most male/female relationships
There are several low angled shots, and low mid shots which only show Benjamin’s wheelchair, this represents him just focus on that representing him as all about his wheel chair, which is another issue we wanted to address.

We wrote our narrative and, we had to find our cast. We wanted to find the perfect people that would fit the people we had in mind, so to do this we held auditions. Other than reliability and dedication we wanted specific things out of each of our characters.

For Benjamin we were looking for:
• Somebody the audience could sympathise with
• A geeky looking character
• An inferior looking person

For tiffany we were looking for:
• A bitchy type character
• Very pretty girl
• A girl consumed by herself
• Power demanding character

We believe that we found the perfect characters through auditions and we believed they portrayed themselves as we wanted them to.