Why stereotypes?

I think that I want to create another short film with a voice over sharing my thoughts on feminism and what it means to me. I want to create an effective video to go along with it and put a visual aspect to what I say. I think that this is a good idea, although it will be a challenge to get it all done in such a short space of time. I wanted to do some added research into my work to make sure that it is accurate. I think that this is pivotal in making an effective piece of work and something that my spectators and audiences are able to really connect with and understand. I went deeper into researching about certain stereotyped groups of people. This was important for the creation of a video that I am creating as it really included all kinds of people and allows my spectator/audience to really get the concept and the meaning behind my work and the movement that I am a part of. One group of people that I wanted to focus on was the black female community, specifically how they need to style their hair to maintain its condition. I find black culture so interesting and want to embrace it myself as well as obviously standing up for the rights of black people too. I find it important for those who are faced with suppression to come together and realise that we are all in it together just at different levels. I also wanted to focus on gay people and the stereotypes that are thrown at them and how being gay seems to label you and put you into a bracket which to me is totally wrong and shouldn’t be the case. I also wanted to work on how transgender people feel within our community and the way that for so many years transgender people, more than others, are being suppressed and made to hide their true selfs and their most authentic selfs. I find all of these people so important in understanding the inequalities of our society and wanted to add this into my work as part of a short film that I am planning on making. I really do believe that the road to equality comes when we realise that we are not alone and that our culture and our being doesn’t need to clash but it can come together to fight suppression. This research is for a small segment of a short film that I will be making which I have decided is going to be my main project and will be getting stills of to create my final book.

How To | Head Wrap

For this particular shoot I wanted to highlight how many white people are happy enough to stand up for black culture yet when it comes to standing up for black lives they take a backseat and don’t want to cause any trouble. I chose the head wrap as I find that it is a clear symbol of black culture and I want my spectators/audience to be able to clearly identify that. This will be a part of a short film that I am currently creating which gives mention to the suppression of black people. I find head wraps so beautiful and think that it makes women of colour look so unique and to me really embraces their culture. After reading more into the reasoning behind the head wrap I really got to grips with just how much of black African culture it represents. The use of the head wrap is to give the hair a break and so that hair can go through deep conditioning, something that black women have to do to maintain their hair. I wanted to embrace this in my work and to really get it right and so I went looking for videos on how to do a proper head wrap. This was really interesting to research and to watch how easy it is to actually do a head wrap yet to me it looks so well put together. Here is a video that really helped me when it came to doing a head wrap on my own head.

Gay stereotypes

There are so many stereotypes within our society today and a lot of those stereotypes come from film or generalisations. I find that movies will often mimic a gay person for comic effect and will over exaggerate a gay person to make it easier for the audience to identify them as ‘the gay one’. I feel that these generic stereotypes have seeped into our society and now people actually think that all gay people are a certain way and have specific attributes. I find this so ridiculous as a sexual preference should not define you as a human being and it shouldn’t be a dominant factor in what you are like as a person. People seem to use these stereotypes to belittle gay people and to put them into a specific box that traps them and often I find that gay people are suppressed. It takes some people so long to ‘come out’ as gay and to actually tell people that they are attracted to the same sex. I really feel that with a lot of people there is a block of what they understand of gay people and think that the movies that they watch portray what gay people are like when in fact you shouldn’t be putting gay people into one category as they are just people who are attracted to the same sex.

Transgender | What it’s like

I really wanted to get what it is like to be transgender more so that I am able to successful portray my character in such a way that will represent this. I am intrigued with transgender people as it seems like such a hard place to be in and can be so isolated at times as I get the feeling that there is a lot of fighting going on in your own head of what is right and wrong and how gender should be. We tend to focus ourselves on how we should look, a woman should look one way and a man should look another way, limiting how people are expected to be. For me transgender people are trapped inside the wrong body, they aren’t authentically themselves if they remain trapped and if they conform to what is expected of them within society. I really want to be able to express the suppression that many transgender people go through as they are not given equal opportunities and people seem to turn a blind eye and think that it’s ‘just a phase’. Funny how our society has really only started to accept gay people over the past few years and they were labelled with the same thing, ‘just a phase’. I want to show how being transgender isn’t a phase and that people actually struggle through and are suppressed by our society.

My response | Experimentation

Originally this work was going to be a part of a short film that I wanted to create but I have now reshaped my idea and will no longer need this content for it but I wanted to post it anyway as this experimentation has helped inform my final project and has helped me to develop my skills with staged images, props and creating different and unique personas. I find this work to be exciting and will get my spectator thinking. This idea came from a short speech that I made with the intent of creating a short film adding in clips over the audio to visualize what I was saying. However, this idea isn’t too relevant to my other work and I feel that, although would have been good, isn’t necessary in my final project.