Evaluation

Evaluation:

On completion of my initial research, focusing on the representation of women in popular music videos, I interpreted the conventions and stereotypes of this genre and manipulated them into a music video of my own. My ambition was to contradict these stereotypes of sexualised and objectified women, to create a much rawer exposition of a woman in that situation or scenery.

In the primary stages of this practical execution, it was clear to me that I wanted to subvert these stereotypes and reflect a representation of women more closely associated with the real women I know and relate to, rather than the construction of the women I had seen in my research. A common convention in these music videos was to have the women dancing, usually around the men in a provocative manner. As aforementioned I wanted to subvert these stereotypes, whilst keeping within the conventions to make the genre easily recognisable, the outcome was my decision to use a female hip-hop dancer and using a remix to the song ‘This is a Man’s World’ by James Brown. This decision, however, arose some difficulties as initially, I wanted to use twin dancers so I could build more of a masculine narrative off of the pair interacting with one another, however, one of the dancers gained an injury before filming and could not dance. To overcome this issue in such a short space of time I simply reorganised the size and positioning of the shots I needed to cater to one dancer instead of two. The reasoning behind this song choice was that in the music videos I researched, one evident motif was the use of derogatory language towards women and in an attempt to contrast this I wanted to use a song, by a male artist, that celebrated and respected women and I felt this song fulfilled both that ambition, whilst also fluid with a modern, pop tempo of music.

I observed the small outfits the women were given to wear in ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke and ‘Carry Out’ by Timbaland, and saw this as an opportunity for subversion, deciding that in my music video the female dancer would be completely dressed, in a stereotypically masculine way, ideally to the extent that her gender was not clear throughout the video. This again was to push the boundaries of the audience’s perspective and cause them to see the dancer for her talent rather than her gender. Originally, under the more popular persuasion of pop music videos being bright and colourful, my production was going to left in full colour, however, on consulting some of my classmates and from reviewing my research I concluded that the black and white colour cinematography in ‘If I Were a Boy’ by Beyoncé, would be more effective as it would aid in the raw, stripped back feel to the video.

A further obstacle in the filming of this music video on schedule would be the weather. During the months of December and January 16/17, there were spells of both snow and rain, this postponed my production as for continuity reasons I could not have snow or puddles in my shots. The only real solution to this was to wait until the weather had cleared and promptly take the shots I needed to complete my video, such as the scenery cut-aways. One final and most difficult inhabitant of my production would be the day before the deadline the free trial for the editing software I was using had expired, and therefore I was unable to export my finished video. Ultimately, the only way to resolve this issue was to subscribe to the Adobe editing software for a brief time to allow my work to be handed in.

Throughout both research and production, especially since I had not attempted any type of filming or video editing before, I have learnt a diverse range of techniques to achieve a product suitable to the genre of music videos I researched, whilst simultaneously subverting its main stereotypes. Through my own exploration, I was able to create slow-motion effects, crop the track to fit in with the shots I had and also improved my skills in problem-solving to ensure my production was not halted by issues but rather allow those issues to take my work in a different, perhaps better, direction.