Above I have attached the finished product of our short film that has a narrative based off of the work of film theorist Laura Mulvey. Mulvey was a feminist who focused the majority of her work on how women are displayed in film. After doing extensive research into Mulvey and her theories I found out that she was the mind behind the 'male gaze' theory. Mulvey stated that the male gaze occurs when the audience is put into the perspective of a heterosexual man. Myself and my partner in this project, Emily, took this idea and decided to create a film that exposed the contrast between reality and how the media portrays women.
We then began to plan a narrative, knowing that we wanted to achieve a film between 1-2 minutes in length and about the drastic difference between women on screen and the day to day life of the average woman. At first we thought that in order to showcase just how sexualised women are in the media we needed to put a female next to a male and create a side by side 'day in the life' video with both a man and a woman with the woman's side being massively oversexualised. This idea may have been very effective some years ago however nowadays with the increase of the 'female gaze' and men also finding themselves in an inappropriate spotlight shone by an idealistic media representation, we decided to focus on questioning how realistic media and film is when it comes to their representation of women. We settled on a narrative that used a girl going about her ordinary morning and then the same girl doing the same activities but as if it was being filmed for a heterosexual male audience.
while filming we used one camera (Nikon D5100) and found that we did not need a tripod, this was because I wanted to make sure that the shots on the ordinary side were kept as realistic and neutral as possible and so I adopted a documentary style to the filming. This means that a handheld camera was used as well a the natural indoor lighting and no obscure angles. We wanted this side to be as boring as possible to make the sexualised side more shocking. Health and safety were maintained throughout the filming process which was pretty straight forward as we did not have a lot of equiptment to work with and we were in an environment that we were all comfortable with which helped the filming go very smoothly.
I took on the role of filming and Emily edited, I felt that both jobs were done to a good extent but I can also see where improvements can be made. On the camerawork side I wish I had adopted more suggestive angles such as close ups and high angles in the sexualised side of the film and even moved the camera more in a music video style in order to increase the contrast between the two sides. I would have liked the sexualised part of the film to be more over the top, distorted and intense. This could have been achieved by researching further into films created to objectify women.
For example finding music videos such as the two imbedded below would have aided me better when deciding on what shots will portray the ideas of Mulvey best and how we could get more into the perspective of a heterosexual male. The music video for 'Booty' by Jennifer Lopez and Iggy Azalea is full of close ups and mid shots of the singer's bodies, it is also very choppy with jump cuts slicing shots up massively. The camera often slowly pans down their figures while the editing distorts this by chopping it up and inserting other close up shots of other body parts. The whole thing is extremely busy and intense which is what i wanted to achieve in our short film. I think that by making the sexualised parts of our film louder by faster paced editing, more close ups and mid shots, and slow motion pans up and down our character's body; we would have made our message more obvious. The same distorted/fast pace editing and camerawork are used in the music video 'Faded' by Tinashe. In this the camera focuses purely on her body and movements as if obsessed with her, this is the sort of intensity that I feel our film needed in order to be more shocking and memorable.
In terms of editing that was achieved I think that the message was portrayed well and I liked how putting a 'wavy effect' over the footage on the sexualised side and inserting loud white noise that turned into obnoxiously heavy rave music helped to signify the lack of reality in what the media shows of women and how the truth is disrupted for women on screen. However I would have preferred the shots after the disclaimer sign flashes up to all be from the oversexualised side as I think that would have made more sense and would have showed how media ideals are taking over everyday normality. I also would have ended the film on a sexualised shot instead of making the narrative circular because I feel that this would have left the audience thinking more about how oversexualised the shot is instead of being taken back to the mundane shots, I think that this was confusing and may have made an audience think there was a different narrative there. Apart from these changes I would have made, I felt that the film got across Mulvey's ideas to an effective extent and I think that what we set out to aim was achieved. I think our film did a good job of showing the contrast between what film would look like if it was filmed from an unbiased, neutral perspective and if it was filmed to satisfy a heterosexual audience.
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