How is Age Being Represented in The Series 6 Skins Trailer?
In this trailer for the television show skins, young adults (teenagers) are being represented
as reckless, irresponsible and rebellious. There are many clips shown in the trailer and we
see mostly through the use of mis-en-scene and editing that they are being presented to
the audience as such. Interestingly however, they are presented less through the use of
diagetic/non diagetic sounds and camera angles.
Mis-en-scene in this clip is interesting. Some of the props reused throughout most of the
trailer are alcoholic drinks and cigarettes. This suggests that the characters of the show use
these things regularly and so this could connote their unruly lifestyle. Quite a few of the
settings in most of the clips also seem to be from a party of some sort, which again connotes
how they probably do things like this on a regular basis. Costume wise, we could see that
the girls a lot of the time were wearing revealing outfits, which suggests promiscuity on
their part and also it was noticeable that two of the girls were wearing red dresses, and the
colour red usually symbolizes danger. The boys on the other hand were seen wearing messy
and unkempt clothing for most of the trailer, which implies how unorganised they are; a
typical trait when regarding teenage boys.
Moving on to editing, you begin to notice soon enough that the clips of the trailer have
been edited in a specific way. At times, they show the exact same thing happening to each
character right after the other and I noticed this the most when they showed each character
at one point crying or in a fight. This was a good way of representing young age as reckless
and rebellious as the more of these types of scenes they showed, the more emphasis it gave
to audience that this is how they are meant being represented. Also, they made sure that
some clips were longer than others, and the longer scenes tended to be the ones that had
more drama piled in as opposed to the happy, calm scenes. This in itself represents young
adults as irresponsible and reckless because this suggests to the audience that they have
more drama in their life than happiness.
There isn’t any use of diagetic sound in this trailer but the use of non-diagetic sound does
seem to bring some assumptions. The song used in the trailer is powerful and emotional,
and it goes well with the clips in the trailer. The song represents how dramatic their
lives really are and the audience would definitely see the characters truly as young and
rebellious.
