Poster Analysis #2: Ant-Man

Following on from last fortnight's analysis of The Jungle Book, here's another great poster that can be used for visual literacy with high school English classes. It isn't an official poster released by Marvel's marketing team but instead comes from a freelance designer, Thomas Walker. This, however, doesn't preclude it from analysis as it still has a lot going for it in terms of its elements working together towards a common promotional goal.

Here are some of the elements broken down...

Vector and Perspective: One of this poster's various striking design choices is the array of red and black points that come in from the left, bottom, and right sides of the poster's boundaries. Each one of these is an example of a vector, with the eye being drawn along these lines to a common point of interest - Ant-Man himself. The tapering of these lines, coupled with the way that the ant-shadow becomes smaller as we track it from the border inwards to the middle of the poster, creates a sense of perspective as well. 

Size: One of the themes of the poster is the diminutive size of the hero, which fittingly echoes the content of the film itself. The size of Ant-Man could be interpreted by the eye as a figure placed far away into the background and, while this is true, the aforementioned tapering perspective also helps to sell the idea that this is a three-dimensional view of a small figure. The ant-shadow provides a frame of reference for this size and conveys the idea that the hero is dwarfed by ants.

Salience: As mentioned in the previous blog entry, salience is a subjective matter whereby the viewer identifies the main visual item in the image's mise en scene. Students may choose either Ant-Man or the ant-shadow as the focal point (or something else?). Part of the fun of this will be in getting the students to justify their opinion by describing the impact that things like vectors or scale and size may have had on their verdict.

Shadow / Contrast: The stark white background provides enough contrast to ensure that Ant-Man stands out despite his smaller size. In addition to this, the shadow of the ant provides a contrasting counterpoint to all this white and balances the mise en scene from a design standpoint. The ant-shadow also plays a more symbolic role (albeit a really obvious piece of symbolism) in that it represents the lead character's connection to ants. The size of the ant-shadow further symbolises the extent of the hero's power too.

Colour Choice: The design choice of red and black for the tapered points is a no-brainer as it matches Ant-Man's costume. Generally speaking, the overall combination of red, black, and white can have more particular connotations. In Western culture, the colours black and red have the most sinister and 'evil' associations (death, darkness, blood, stop) and have historical ties to a range of evils both in reality (the Nazi Party) and in fiction (vampire cloaks, Darth Maul and the First Order in Star Wars, V for Vendetta's totalitarian regime, the bad guys in Tron, Mordor's colour palette in the Lord of the Rings films, House Bolton in Game of Thrones). It isn't much of a step from here to create a broader colour palette - this typically expands to include white and grey. So what do we make of the decision to create a hero using these traditionally diabolical colours? Well, for a start, the decision to costume Ant-Man in this way tracks back to the original comics from the 1960s. It isn't just super-villains who prefer this colour scheme - both Coca-Cola and the White Stripes also have a love for all things red, black, and white. It's a very eye-catching combination. Thematically though, we can take into account the idea that Marvel Film's Ant-Man starts as an anti-hero of sorts - he is an ex-con who has just served significant jail-time and he has a history of committing petty crime. Perhaps we can tie the colour choice for this character to the idea that he isn't your typical superhero? At the least, colour theory supports the combination of these colours as complimentary.

Dutch Angle: The poster uses a 'dutch' or tilted angle. This askew view is a popular directorial choice in the morally-grey film noir genre as well as narratives set in psychologically-complex or disturbed settings. We can interpret the designer's choice here in two ways. The first is that the generic convention of this angle plays into the character's criminal backstory; Paul Rudd's hapless character would not be that out of place as the protagonist in an actual film noir. The second interpretation is that the tilted view has a suggestion of slight disorientation, which links in with Ant-Man's power to shrink himself and change the way he interacts with his environment (often with disorientating effect). 

Match Cut: Ant-Man's leg shadows have been matched with the ant's antennae in the mise en scene of the poster. For want of a better term, I'm going to call this a 'match cut' - a reference to a film technique where a shot of something will cut to a shot of something else whilst retaining some common element. One of the most famous examples of this is Stanley Kubrick's 2001, where a caveman throws a bone into the air and the next shot features a satellite rotating through space in a similar manner to said bone. The purpose of the match cut is to create a thematic link between two completely separate scenes in separate settings. In this poster for Ant-Man, the designer has created a link between the hero and the ant by making their shadows overlap one another. 

Body Language: The posture of Ant-Man is suggestive of Marvel's now-familiar 'hero' shot. This is a shot where the hero is photographed from behind with their head turned to one side. It accentuates the musculature of the back and is suggestive of someone steeling themselves to defend against an attack (a heroic idea in itself - the hero is never the one to strike first). Marvel love this pose and have made it something of a meme for all their heroes.

Other Elements: There are a couple of other small touches that contribute to the overall effectiveness of the poster. The particles around the edges are a nice addition as they could be viewed as a form of foreshadowing that's representative of Ant-Man's ultimate quest in the film to shrink himself down to the molecular level. Another element is the way in which the font choice for the film title is reminiscent of classic comic fonts from the 1960s. 

And, even though this isn't an official poster, the absence of Paul Rudd's name speaks to the fact that it isn't necessary for Marvel to sell their films on the basis of an actor's presence - it's the characters that audiences go to see with superhero films (case in point, how many people have been disappointed by the cinematic Hulk being played by three separate actors? Or how easy is it for studios to recast Batman without fear of audience backlash?)

Questions for Students

Students will need to think about some of the bigger questions tied to the purpose of a film poster.

1. What message is this poster trying to convey about the film?
2. How does this poster want the audience to think about the film?
3. What is the poster designer relying on to help 'sell' the film?

In order to get them there, you could ask a range of questions related to the above visual literacy elements. Think about:

1. What is the significance of the colours used?
2. Comment on the body language and placement of Ant-Man, and how the viewer interacts with this.
3. Describe the more symbolic elements of the poster and explain how and why they've been used.
   
4. What is the salient part of the image? How do you know this?
5. Draw the vectors and indicate where they lead the eye, and why.
6. Describe the mise en scene and angle/size of the shot.
7. What genres are being suggested, how are they being suggested, and why are they being suggested?
8. Explain why the film does not have a tagline or actor names in big letters. 

And then, after all of the above has been completed, ask students to consider whether they think the poster worked in getting their attention and why this was the case. If they did not like the poster, they will need to justify how they would redesign it.

Poster Analysis #1: The Jungle Book

In a previous life I wrote a lot of film reviews. It made little money but it was a labor of love and, hey, who doesn't love movies? I still love cinema but I don't get anywhere near enough time these days to keep up with its latest ebbs and flows. 

 

I can still indulge in my fascination with film posters though because the internet is awash in them!

One of the benefits of the internet is that it democratised information. Things became accessible to a broader range of people and this continues to grow broader, meaning that if you have the inclination to design your own film poster you can do this and then potentially share it with millions upon millions of other people. This also works for the big guys too, with any marketed material now proliferated throughout the internet.

Over the next month I've decided to tackle Nanowrimo for the third time (third time's the charm, right?) so I'll have little time to write blog posts. I thought I might keep things ticking along by looking at a few posters.

There are several striking things about the above poster that tie into the study of visual literacy in the English classroom. Let's break it down element by element.

Light and Shade: The borders of the poster are cast in shadow, creating silhouette-like effects for the figures in the foreground. This 'vignetting' of the image pulls the viewer's focus into the middle, where the source of light is, which brings us to...

Salience: The salient (main) feature of an image is usually its central figure, or a large piece of writing. This is almost always a matter of perspective - what each viewer sees as having salience may differ, as does the creator's vision of what will be salient. It's worth thinking of a poster as an exercise in persuasion - it's a product design to persuade the viewer to be interested. I would argue that the salient part of this image is one of it's smallest visual features - the flame in Mowgli's hand, which may be making a thematic point. A lot of the elements work together to draw our eye to this point. But, as mentioned, this is a matter of perspective. 

Colour: Colour often functions as a form of symbolism. We attach colours to certain connotations or associations, dependent on our cultural background. For example, in Western cultures the colour white is used to symbolise purity and peace (as seen in the wearing of a white dress at a wedding, or the waving of a white flag). In Ancient Egypt, however, white was the colour for death, and among the Bedouin peoples white represents fertility and happiness. In the case of The Jungle Book, the colours are organic, orange/yellow to represent the light brought by Mowgli, and blue/green to demonstrate the nature-based setting of the jungle.

Colour wheels demonstrate colour oppositions and help designers select colours that will contrast well with one another.

 

Colour also functions, from a design standpoint, in concert with other colours for aesthetic impact. A cursory understanding of colour theory will help students comprehend why certain colour palettes are used when creating images for film. The poster for The Jungle Book takes a muted approach to the often overused blue/orange contrast (look up blue/orange film posters to see just how often these two colours get used together). Part of the reason for this is that it demonstrates a juxtaposition between a 'cool' colour and a 'warm' one, which can assist with attracting the eye. 

Camera Angle / Shot Size: The camera is placed somewhere between eye level and slightly lower, and captures an extreme long shot of Mowgli in his environment. The angle and shot size work together to place an emphasis on the setting (the jungle) and Mowgli's role in leading a vanguard of sorts into this realm (making him the viewer's identification point in this poster/film). The size of Mowgli in comparison to the environment also suggests a certain power in the setting - that Mowgli is dwarfed against these ruins suggests that they are something to be reckoned with, something that will feature significantly in the film.

Mise en scene: This French term literally translates as 'setting the stage' and refers to the design of things within the shot. A director needs to consider mise en scene when arranging what the audience sees in each shot and how they see it. In this case, we have an 'over-the-shoulder' shot of sorts that places the viewer on the shoulder of the animals as they look up towards Mowgli. The image itself is neatly split into background-midground-foreground by the architecture, creating a three-dimensional effect looking into the environment, which dovetails nicely into the film's promotion as a '3D' experience. 

Focus: The camera is focused predominantly on the foreground and, at a pinch, the midground too. The large statue-head in the background is unfocused - perhaps inviting curiosity from the viewer, a sense of something being held back out of reach, something that would bear further investigation if the viewer agrees to watch the film. 

Vectors: Images often utilise lines (imagined or real) to draw the viewer's eye to where the designer wants them to look first. There aren't clear, strong examples of this in The Jungle Book's poster, but the contours of the animals in the foreground - the big cat, the wolf, the monkeys, and even the snake, all seem to point towards Mowgli in the middle. This isn't a coincidence; he's the main character. This is part of how we know he's intended to be interpreted as the main character.

Font: There's a slightly cursive, scimitar-like quality to the key parts of the lettering that is reminiscent of colonial India. The pock-marked texturing of the letters also correlates with the texture of the ruins in the image, suggesting the worn and aged surface of stone structures deep within the jungle. 

Gaze: Gaze is often characterised in terms of how the viewer engages with media. In the English classroom this can refer to where a central character is looking in an image - do the eyes make contact with the camera (and therefore the audience)? Do they look off-centre at something else? What do these acts symbolise in relation to the content of the text? In the case of The Jungle Book, we are given no eyes to observe. Instead, Mowgli's gaze is elsewhere. The gaze of the animals is elsewhere. Where do these eyes look? What role is the audience being cast into by this act? These things coincide to place emphasis on the setting and it's three-dimensional quality. It's an invitation to adventure.

Generic Conventions: Allowing the viewer to identify genre is a big part of a film's effort to promote itself. In this case, The Jungle Book suggests the genres of adventure and fantasy through its inclusion of animals, architecture suggestive of ancient civilisation, the boy's heroic and curious stance, and the previously-mentioned evocations of the font and the gaze of the characters. The image also showcases the computer-generated scenery and animal-characters that feature in the film - elements made possible by 21st century technology. This is a wave of technological innovation that has played into Disney's relatively recent effects-driven wave of adapting their classic animated oeuvre into live action, a trend that could be seen as a 2010s-2020s sub-genre unto itself (see their effects-heavy live action remakes of: Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Mulan, Dumbo).

Promotional Choices: The choice to only portray these characters from behind could also be interpreted as a deliberate 'holding back' of detail. Disney knows that these are popular characters and that a big drawcard for modern audiences will be seeing what Shere Khan, Baloo, Bagheera, King Louie, etc., all look like in this expensive, modern adaptation. The property itself - a story produced by Disney from a well-known book and a well-known animated film - means that there is little need to rely on A-list actors to attract viewers. Hence, we don't see any actors in the poster, and the names are relatively small. There is also no need for a tagline - it's The Jungle Book, most people already know approximately what it is, so Disney knows that their best approach is to instead focus on their recreation of this beloved story and the way that modern cutting-edge special effects are being used to bring it to life.

Questions for Students

Students will need to think about some of the bigger questions tied to the purpose of a film poster.

1. What message is this poster trying to convey about the film?
2. How does this poster want the audience to think about the film?
3. What are the filmmakers relying on to to help 'sell' the film?

In order to get them there, you could ask a range of questions related to the above visual literacy elements. Think about:

1. How has colour been used to attract the viewer's attention?
2. How has colour been used to represent the film's themes?
3. Comment on the body language and gaze of the characters, and how the viewer interacts with these.
4. What is the salient part of the image?
5. Draw the vectors and indicate where they lead the eye, and why.
   
6. Describe the mise en scene and angle/size of the shot.
7. What genre is being suggested and how?
8. Explain why the film does not have a tagline.

And then, after all of the above has been completed, ask students to consider whether they think the poster worked in getting their attention and why this was the case. If they did not like the poster, they will need to justify how they would redesign it.

Stand-Alone Lesson: Parents Just Don't Understand

The last few weeks have been challenging for just about everyone. As Term 1 wound down, and the era of COVID-19 descended upon education, teachers found themselves needing to adapt to online learning platforms as a substitute for face-to-face teaching.

I don't have enough time, space, or inclination to go into my experiences in moving to Google Classroom during the last three weeks. There have been some failures, some ongoing challenges, and (I hope) some small successes. I'm still feeling my way through it all and learning about what I do and don't like, what I think might work, and how I might force things to work.

Suffice to say, this is still a teething stage. As it is for many teachers.

During the transition stage at the end of Term 1 I created the following Junior lesson in order to test a few things out. It may or may not be useful in your context if you need to fill a lesson separate to your current scope and sequence.

Firstly, students will need to watch the following music video. This was chosen in response to some Year 8 students who love rap/hip-hop... do you know how difficult it is to find family-friendly rap music? Luckily Will Smith was on hand to help me out. 

As it's a music video it would be remiss to only cover the lyrical content so I provided the students with a worksheet that covered their comprehension in terms of both written and visual literacy. The use of the table format to project questions alongside the relevant parts of the text is an adaptation of the Cornell note-taking method and is part an ongoing effort I've been making to get my Year 8 and Year 9 students to internalise the annotation process.

There are two versions of the worksheet - one for Stage 4 and one for Stage 5.

Parents Just Don't Understand - Stage 4 (Year 8 version)

Parents Just Don't Understand - Stage 5 (Year 9 version)

Note that the Year 9 version includes a question comparing this song to a previous song the class had studied. This can be adapted to suit your context.

The Lost Boys: A Study Guide

Kylo Ren in his teenage days...

The Lost Boys is a perfect companion to Dracula for use in the Preliminary English Extension 1 Text, Culture and Value module, in that it both parallels and offers alternatives to Bram Stoker's seminal text. Below is a study guide resource that can be used to support teaching The Lost Boys.

The first section of the guide provides a Cast of Characters that will assist students in establishing who's who in the film. There are essentially 9 characters of note (10 if you want to count the rest of David's gang as a single character).

• Michael: The protagonist.
• Sam: The deuteragonist (secondary protagonist) and Michael's younger brother.
• Lucy: Their mother. Note: her name has deliberately been borrowed from Dracula.
• Star: Michael's love interest.
• David: The antagonist and leader of the 'Lost Boys' gang.
• Grandpa: Lucy's father.
• Edgar and Alan Frog: Supporting characters; they are the film's equivalent of Dracula's 'Van Helsing' character.
• Max: Lucy's love interest and quite a significant character in the film's climactic scenes.
• The Lost Boys: David's gang of vampires.

Also featured in the film but not mentioned in the document are:

• Laddie: A boy vampire and companion to Star.
• The Surf Nazis: A local (non-vampire) gang that the Lost Boys feud with throughout the film.
• Nanook: Sam and Michael's dog.
• Thorn: Max's dog. 

The rest of the study guide looks at the film by providing a series of sample shots with accompanying analysis. I've arbitrarily broken the film into 8 sections (a prologue and seven 'chapters') to help students think of the plot elements in regards to the narrative. The analysis is unpacked in the following fashion:

• Example - a shot that can be analysed in reference to the module.
• Description, Techniques - describing what is happening in the shot and what techniques have bee used to communicate ideas to the audience.
• Context, Values - subsequent analysis linked to the film's context both in terms of the vampire myth (Dracula) and its own time/place. In addition, where possible, the film's communication of key values is identified as well.

Example 1

Description, Techniques: Camera pans up as David walks out of the mist between disaffected teenagers riding the merry-go-round. Note his scruffiness, swaggering body language, and the cigarette behind the ear.

Context, Values: David and the other Lost Boys move between the static horses on the merry-go-round, which establishes how they don't quite fit in with other teenagers. David stops at a girlfriend of another local hoodlum and caresses her, echoing the mesmeric effect that Count Dracula and the Weird Sisters have on characters in Dracula. This sequence (and his costume) also demonstrates that David is not bound by social conventions attached to other people.

Example 2

Description, Techniques: Michael struggles to wake up in the morning and now needs sunglasses to protect his eyes against the sunlight. To an outsider he seems hungover, and the idea of teenage surliness in the morning becomes an allegory for his transformation into a vampire.

Context, Values: Note that Michael now has his ear pierced - symbolising his rebellion against adult-enforced gender norms. Sam asks Michael, "Are you freebasing?", a reference to doing cocaine and an echo of the words that many anxious parents ask sullen teenage boys exhibiting drastic changes in behaviour. In this case, as with previous examples, Michael's anti-social behaviour is in reality a result of vampirism. This is exemplified further when Michael is rude to his grandfather.

Resource: the full Study Guide can be found here.

This Looper-created video above is also helpful for providing some analysis of the film's context and how this shaped its representation of the era's values. Not all of the video will be completely relevant but students may still find it of interest. 

Pushing for Depth in Our Students' Thinking - David Camp

The Shore School (also known as the Sydney Church of England Grammar School). What a view!

It's a drizzly, slightly-steamy Saturday morning in Milson's Point, and I'm mingling with the learning cultures set at the Shore School for the 2017 'Cultures of Thinking' Conference. This convergence of teachers from all sectors of education comes at the behest of Project Zero, the Harvard School of Education's 50 year-old investigation into the Arts as a cognitive science.

It's free professional learning, which in my mind is one of the best kinds, and it's the best way to end a teaching week. Imagine contrasting the chaotic daily challenges that come with teaching in a comprehensive high school setting with a day of positive pedagogy. The sharing of growth-promoting teaching practice not only meets our Professional Standards for Standard 6 (Engage in Professional Learning); it also feels good and enables me to continue developing my approach to the classroom. 

There was mention made today of 'learning teachers'. If I'm anything in my job, I believe that I'm a 'learning teacher'. I won't ever stop learning and it's explicit exploration of this concept that continues to give my job meaning and, if I'm honest, adds value to my life.

David Camp is Head of English at the Emmanuel School, a Jewish school in Randwick, and he presented a fantastic session on rendering thinking more visible in line with Project Zero's aims for building a more pragmatic and embedded 21st century learning culture.

I've written before about Project Zero's See Think Wonder activity but it's always useful to revisit this practical tool for visible thinking with different examples, and Mr Camp showed us a great example in his session, which I'll outline below.

But firstly, to recap, the See Think Wonder paradigm asks for the responder to look at a text and ask the following questions, in this order:

1. What do you see
2. What does that make you think about?
3. What does it make you wonder?

Watch the Pink Floyd film clip above (a classic) and then See Think Wonder it. Can I use 'See Think Wonder' as a verb? Why, yes I can, it's a neologism.

So, firstly, we SEE. Identify what you can see but don't attach anything of significance to your notes for this part.

Secondly, THINK. What associations or connotations come from what you see? What is being suggested?

And the third part, we WONDER. What do you want to know more about? What does it make you wonder? What are the bigger questions that arise from this text?

Here's my modelled example, completed in context during the session administered by Mr Camp (IE. The conditions we would ask students to do it in, only perhaps I was given less time to do it in - which is fine as Mr Camp covered a lot!)

See

People walking, classrooms, stuffy, high angle vs. low angle shots, muted colour scheme, modern/1970s music, montage of images, corporal punishment, drudgery, panning shot of bricks and grey, marching students, cellblocks, large clock, close-up on feet walking in unison, identical uniforms, teacher with idiosyncratic accent, angry, wide shot of hundreds of students, shadow of hammer falling with machinery, students turning into sausages, students smashing school, breaking bricks and windows, piling up of wood, burning building down, camera panning down to flames, flames are the first glimpse of real colour in the whole clip.

Think

Historical associations - teacher's accent reminiscent of German / hard to understand - allusions to Nazism and Hitler? Dystopia. Symbolism of students being ground into sausages representative of exploitation and waste. Piling up of wood - French Revolution. Panning shots show how big and insidious the control is. Wall being broken down - connection to Berlin Wall coming down (a prediction?) Revolution. High angle and low angle shots establish relationship of power.

Wonder

When was this text made, specifically? What was going in the world at that time? What happens to the sausages? Do the adults eat them? Who directed it? Is it a criticism of private schools? Or all schools in general? Or education in general? Or society in general? Which message is the most important - the value of the individual? The rigid structured nature of education? Has the system ever worked?

As you can see, the See Think Wonder activity is a great way to deepen student cognition. Mr Camp says that it takes thinking from the 'literal to the figurative, the shallow to the deep', and he also speaks about applying the framework to non-visual texts, explaining it as thus:

1. What do you see? (identify the key words)
2. What does it make you think about? (Which of the elements you have studied - themes, techniques, moments, quotes - comes to mind for these ideas?)
3. What do you wonder? (What are the deeper ramifications raised in the question?)

This was just a small part of David Camp's overall seminar.

Something else I'd like to share that he covered was exploring what the future classroom might look like. 

The Jetsons view of the future classroom gets points for including robot teachers, however, the apparent presence of a blackboard seems unnecessarily hip and retro.

We were asked to imagine what our class would look like if money and time weren't issues. In other words, what would we do with our room to create the sort of student we want to see. This activity was guided through the use of six key questions, and it might be fun, intrepid reader, if you wanted to try this too - it's a useful activity for rendering our abstract philosophy as something more explicit.

• What does this classroom look like?
• What does it sound like?
• What type of questions are being asked? and by whom?
• Who is interacting with whom and how?
• What types of activities are taking place?
• What is the headline for your classroom? That is, if a newspaper came along five years after you created this perfect classroom, what headline would they run?

My thoughts in relation to each of the above questions:

• I'd love to have windows that could be closed with shutters to keep light out, screens on each wall for projection from my computer, air conditioning, whiteboards on every wall, single tables to facilitate better maneuverability in the classroom - or, better yet, some way of programming a table-organisation plan into an app that then moves the tables around in my room for me on a period by period basis. How cool would that be? Also, I'd love a way of electronically opening my classroom door with a button on a key (like my car). 
• Soundwise, I'd hope my classroom would sound loud during discussion, and quieter than that when I'm trying to speak to everyone. To be honest, I haven't really thought about sound in the classroom that much. I'd love to have high quality speakers that played loud enough without distracting neighbouring classrooms. Sound-proofing between rooms, maybe?
• In terms of the third and fourth points, I would want students to question everything, from in-context and comprehension questions relating to the content of texts being studied, to metaquestions about curriculum and teaching practise. I would like students to feel comfortable giving honest and useful feedback to me, and to ask why we learn what we learn, and how it relates to what they might want to do with their lives.
• The kinds of activities would be predominantly student-designed with teacher guidance (where necessary). Students would match what they learn with their vocational goals and interests, they would research projects of their choice in order to apply their learning authentically to the outside world, and would interact with teachers in a meaningful way to meet their personal learning goals.
• And my headline? Students Take Control of Classroom: Coming to grips with co-design between teacher and student.

Comparative Study: Elysium Comprehension Questions

In this post I outlined my thinking for teaching a Comparative Study on Animal Farm and Elysium. Whilst there isn't much point in presenting resources on Animal Farm (there are plenty of activities on Orwell's fable already out there), I do think there is a niche to fill on Elysium resources. My previous post detailed the contextual elements that Elysium draws on, so the next logical point from here is to have students work through some study guide questions that get them to engage with the text on a more immediate level. 

The resource below presents a mix of comprehension and visual analysis questions, and requires students to interact with the film on literal, figurative and contextual levels.  I recommend projecting it onto the whiteboard so students can see the screenshots in full colour.

Resource - Elysium Student Guide (click to download).

I've also included a teacher version for ease of delivery, which gives possible answers. If you use this, please don't feel restricted by my answers. I actually composed most of these answers via whole class discussion with my Year 11 Advanced English students, and there are no doubt a whole bunch of other interpretations that would work in response to the questions as well.

Resource - Elysium Teacher Guide (click to download).

Happy Dystopias!