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

When creating our protagonists and other characters, we needed to take the representation of particular social groups into account. We wanted to utilise stereotypical and conventional representations to emphasise the contrast in their personalities, particularly with relation to state of mind and gender.

Inspirations

The protagonist in chick-flicks is almost always the good girl, she is often flawed but always has good intentions or realises her wrong-doings. 

In Easy A, Olive begins the movie as a relatively unknown and shy junior in a high school in southern California. Although lies are stirred and get out of hand throughout the film, the end produces a new and improved, loved girl. 

Both Gabriella from High School Musical and Elle from Legally Blonde maintain their nice-girl characteristics throughout the whole movie, and provide a constant girly grounding to the films where much is changing around them.

One of our main inspirations for Lauren's character was Lizzie from The Lizzie McGuire Movie. She is attractive, blonde and friendly-looking. Her nice personality and bubbly teenage girl demeanor is very over-played in the opening sequence to the film, but the flaws slowly start to unravel. This is what we intended for Lauren.

Lauren	Scarlett
Gender
Lauren is the very stereotypical and conventional girly-girl in Pretty Popular. The colour pink engulfs her room and her walls are covered in photos. She has a lot of makeup and perfume and wears traditionally feminine items of clothing eg/ Skirt and heels. She seem very chatty when with her friends on the journey to school, which again is a stereotypical female trait. In contrast to all of these conventional traits, Lauren challenges the stereotypical dumb-blonde girl by being enthusiastic and intelligent.	Scarlett is very feminine, but in a less sugar-coated and girly way compared to Lauren. Her colour scheme is very red compared to the traditional girl’s pink. She almost represents the stereotypical sexualised female, with her short skirt and bright red lipstick.
Age
Lauren is presented as a perfect and ideal school-girl. The choice of actress ensures we present the teenage age-group justly, as she does not look too old or too young. We have represented her, again, very stereotypically. She has photos and posters all over her walls, which seems like a very teenage decorative style. She is up to date with fashion; we see her packing her Cambridge satchel before heading off to school.	Like Lauren, Scarlett is presented as a school girl. We can tell by her uniform and school brochures on the table top. Her alarm is on her phone, which exemplifies the modern-day technologically absorbed teenager.  The actress portrays the age we intended well.  We know that the legal age for smoking in the UK is 16, so this also adds to a rough indication of how old the character is. Smoking has increased among young people with ‘570 children a day’ taking it up. We really wanted to emphasise this in our ‘bad girl’ character.
Race
Lauren, our protagonist, is a middle-class white-British girl. We initially wanted to make her Asian, but decided that we wanted to make our film very British. Rather than challenging the stereotypical white lead, we wanted to challenge the All-American ditsy blonde, and created Lauren in contrast to this. However, both her boyfriend and one of her friends are Asian, rather than them being tokens, we wanted to incorporate this to truly reflect the multicultural London that the film is set in.	Although Scarlett is a white British character, the actress portraying her is in fact Indian. We thought this would add something interesting to our piece because it proves that ethnicities are on equal footings.
State of Mind
Lauren, as already stated, is presented as the perfect school girl. We chose to show this in many ways. Clothing often reflects personality, so her smart clothing and satchel were essential. Her room was almost her personality hub. Everything was neat, and had its place, the table tops were clear and the drawer was organised. We ensured to slot other little iconographic extras into her room, including medals draped over her mirror and an A* graded piece of work.	Scarlett’s character is clearly the ‘bad-girl’ of our film. We presented this in various ways. For example, her short skirt, scruffy shirt and red lips. Her bedroom also reflects her personality, with clothes scattered on the floor, messy surfaces, condoms in her drawer and cigarette packets littered around the room. Even the colour red which we associate with her signifies danger and lust.
Improvements
We had originally intended to use a shot of Lauren on Facebook, to show that all personalities in this age group are technologically savvy. This would also help attract the modern audience. However, it was unusable, and if we had a chance to re-do the opening sequence I would definitely try to add it in. Her Asian friend and boyfriend were not intended to be tokens, but may come across that way. So I feel we could have given their characters more depth and screen-time. Her boyfriend is particularly important to the narrative so giving him a moment in the opening would have been ideal.	Seeing as we went down the route of sexualising Scarlett as a female, I feel we could have exaggerated this, so it was more obvious to the audience.

We chose to make our two protagonists stereotypical in more ways than they challenge conventions. This was due to the genre of our film and our audience. We felt that the young girls bracket would enjoy watching a recognisable film to a further extent than something which was new and unconventional.

However, one of our main challenges was inspired by Mean Girls:
Our protagonist is similar to Regina George in many ways, looks, hair colour, style, class etc. However, the difference being that Regina is the 'villain' and our Lauren is the 'hero'. We have challenged the stereotypical 'bad' blonde, and Regina's personality is portrayed more through our characterisation of Scarlett.