Evaluation (Part 1)

1. How does your media product use, develop or challenge the forms and conventions of real media products?

The use of an opening sequence in the creation of a film is generally to introduce the main themes and characters, setting, genre and narrative. In our opening sequence, we create a melodramatic tone, demonstrating the negativity surrounding Sophie, our main character, in her everyday life. We allow the audience to see Sophie's solid depression, her interaction with her parents, and her need for solitude and control, neither of which she seems able to get.

The main characters are established immediately - Sophie, a teenage girl suffering from depression; her mother, a quiet woman who doesn't really understand what's going on, and her father, a man used to being in charge, and frustrated by his lack of understanding and control concerning Sophie.

The setting is established with little doubt - costumes, accents, attitudes and general mise-en-scene clearly show the film to be set in modern-day England.

Conventions of the melodramatic genre are threaded throughout the opening sequence. Sophie feels pressurised to behave in a certain way, to be happy with what she has, to achieve certain things, to enjoy her life. However, she feels incapable of this and cannot act on her situation. Consequently, the catharsis is a masochistic inner conflict, rather than a confrontation between several characters. The characters are fairly two-dimensional and can be categorised into "Good and Evil, Innocence and Villainy" (Elsaesser). Therefore, to make the characters more relatable, they must be juxtaposed to create clashes between the characters and contexts. The melodramatic genre is often on the side of the victim - those in power (usually male) to be considered evil, and the oppressed (female) to be good.

The narrative is introduced in the opening sequence to be a small-scale story - personal rather than public. The characters are ordinary people, and are placed in a situation which might also be considered as fairly normal. The audience immediately know that the story is about the consequences of leaving depression untreated, and are drawn in by a compassion for Sophie, and a curiosity to find out how she deals with her depression.

2. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Refer to Character Representation Analysis.

The main character in this film is similar to the target audience, thus allowing for them to identify with her. Sophie is a British girl, about fourteen or fifteen years old, living a normal, everyday life. She goes to school, lives with her parents, and has the same struggles as everyone else. However, she is also suffering from depression, and is consequently, albeit inadvertently, victimised by her parents, her peers, and herself. The catharsis of a melodrama such as this is, rather than a physical confrontation between multiple characters, an inner conflict of the protagonist. Sophie's inner conflict is her depression, and her personal catharsis demonstrates the social group of teenage girls as victims, with a lack of control over their own lives, and struggling to deal with the overwhelming turmoil of emotion alone.

Parents of teenage girls are also represented in a specific way in the film. Sophie's parents are the main example of this, and show how dangerous a lack of understanding can be. They don't understand exactly what she is going through, and cannot emotionally support her. They make mistakes that lead to Sophie feeling alienated and alone, and don't make quite enough of an effort to comprehend what she is going through. They demonstrate the significance of parents in the lives of their children, and are a clear representation of how important it is to get things right. Also, we would later in the film show Sophie’s father as an abuser. He puts his own sexual needs first, with no consideration for the feelings of the other characters.