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

The representation of certain social groups are often manipulated by real media products, sometimes they follow the stereotype, sometimes they challenge it and at other times they develop the idea.  Our product incorporates characters that can follow, challenge and develop.

The social group we focus on in 'Glitch' is hackers. We wanted to represent hackers as more than just young white males who wear glasses, despite the fact that this is what our main character is. Here are the actors who played during the opening sequence of our film. They were given the task of representing the social group of hackers as a group, but in their own individual ways.

Our main character, known as "Noob" to his fellow hackers, played by Nico Socratous. We decided to represent our main hacker as a teenage white male, therefore leading us to choose Nico. He does not wear glasses so this was part of the costume. His hair is also styled so that is messier as we wanted to connote that stereotypical hackers are generally quite laidback and don't really care so much about their appearance.

Robbie Lardi plays the lead hacker who is attacked by a mysterious uniformed man. The reason we chose Robbie is because of his confident, authoritative voice, since he is the only character speaking throughout the opening sequence we needed someone who would be able to capture the attention of the audience while commanding the hackers. Robbie was able to fulfill the role of the lead hacker extremely well.

As you can see, with all the hackers together (not including the lead hacker) we have a equal distribution of males and females, this was decided in order to oppose the social representation that hackers and computer nerds are male.

Although all our actors are 16-18 year old, some look older than others and since we do not state their ages, they can easily pass for adults. Also we demonstrate that these hackers really know how to use this technology that they have. The lead hacker spews lines of strange words that a normal person would not understand, but these hackers are content with the information they are given, following his orders obediently. It is clear that the main hacker has chosen these people based on their abilities rather than gender, age or ethnicity.

We wanted to support the stereotype of hackers by having a protagonist who conformed to it while challenging it at the same time by showing a wide range of hackers, signifying that anyone could be a hacker, regardless of gender, age and ethnicity.