Media Language (Codes and Conventions) & Representation- The Black Hole

Representation: The Black Hole (2008)
  >Synopsis:
     >> A male office worker is at the printer and discovers a black hole which is printed on a piece of paper. At first he thinks it is nothing but when he accidently places his cup in the centre of the black hole it falls through. He ses this to reach through certain objects like the vending machine in which he retrieves a chocolate, then he discovers a better idea by placing the paper with the black hole onto the safe in order to reach his hand in and retrieve money. However, this backfires because of his greed and therefore when he crawls into the safe to get a better view inside the safe, the paper falls to the floor and the office worker is then trapped in the safe with no way out.
     >>Therefore, generally short films tend to represent a stereotypical everyday character that the audience can relate to. For example, in the short film 'The Black Hole' the one main character is a stereotypical businessman who's everyday job is being stuck in the office all day, which is monotonous and repetitive. This relates to both genders of the audience as business women and men who work in an office would generally feel what this character feels like. The location also relates to the audience as the way they have dimmed the colours to make the atmosphere more dull to go with the character's job status, relating more with the audience.
      >>In feature films, stereotypes can be used but because feature films are longer, they can expand and explore binary opposites to stereotypes which are more interesting to the audience as the audience would not find the storyline as cliche as other feature films they may have seen. Binary opposites to stereotypes are characters that go against the genreal stereotype of that age or gender. For example, media represents teenagers or adolscents as rebellious and wild where all they do is party and not care about any consequences, however, a teenage character can be the represented as the complete opposite, like hate partying, studying hard, not going out with friends as much as a stereotypical teenager would. Another example is gender, the stereotypes of females are;
            >Weaker than males
            >Emotional
            >Not good at sports  
            >Responsible for raising a family
However, sometimes women are represented as the complete opposite, they could be strong, independant and not a family-orientated woman, they can be athletes and just as good as men when it comes to sports.
Overall, due to the length of short films, they usually do not have time to explore binary opposite characters to the audience, therefore they stick to a stereotypical character instead that will relate to the audience, but will then show a twist to that character or that specific situation that character is in.