This shoot is very personal to me. It is about my mother and how she runs the house and seems to do everything. I wanted to do this shoot to show the unfair pressures that are put on women with families as they always seem to have to run the household and run around everywhere and be expected to do it all every single day. This is a more ‘traditional’ or old-fashioned household where the woman is now expected to work a full-time job only to come home to do all the cooking, cleaning and maintaining the home. Through my work my mother represents many women that go through this every single day. Growing up I would always look at my mothers role and think that I don’t want that kind of life, where I’m expected to do everything and basically live to serve. To me, she almost becomes a slave in her own home. I don’t want that kind of life and through this shoot I want to find out more about her role and what she thinks about it through interviews with her.
I get really annoyed when I see my mum running around and doing everything for my family. I do have to say that sometimes I am really lazy and don’t do much but I am a teenager and we are known for being extremely lazy. Both my parents should be doing equal amounts of chores to maintain the house, not just my mum. It is so frustrating to see my mum come home later than my dad and go straight into the kitchen to start making dinner when my dad has been home and is more than capable of making it too. However, my dad does sometimes make me dinner but only when my mum is working late or out. They should both equally be spreading things out and working as a team to get all of the chores done rather than just allowing my mum to do it all. There is another side to this though because there have been occasions when I’ve tried to help my mum peel potatoes or vacuum the floor and she just tends to prefer to do it all herself but this is because it is what she is used to and how she has grown to become accustomed to just doing it all on her own. There is not a single part of me that looks at my mums role in the household and wants to do it. I don’t want to come home from a hard day of working to them work some more and not get to rest until I go to bed. I have no desire to be a ‘housewife’ and run after my husband day in and day out. It just isn’t for me. Yet some women are happy and willing to do this which I accept but I feel that, with my mum especially, it has been placed on them since a young age so they know no different and just think that doing everything is the norm and they should always be doing the chores, cleaning and food shopping. Through some interviews I hope to find out a bit more about why she does it all and what she actually thinks about all of the work that she does.
Reflection | Progress so far
After reviewing footage that I have already got of my mum, none of it seems good enough to me to be a still. It just isn’t that interesting on its own. I want to make this film great and for it to stand out and be as visually pleasing as it is interesting to listen to. I am constantly looking at the composition of the shots and getting different angles to make my film more appealing and it is going well. I have managed to collect some good shots together that flow well with the interview which I have playing over the footage. It looks great altogether and really does make sense and is interesting but a still on its own just doesn’t look right and, in my opinion, isn’t a strong enough image to really impact my spectator. This footage will be staying as a film and not made into stills. The only stills that might make it as finals will be the ones of me re-staging and parodying my mums role in the household from the footage I have made of her. I think that this is the best way to move forward as it will be a whole lot more interesting for my spectator who can then go to the film and watch it to get more background and context to the images that I have made. Honestly, I find looking at stills of the film boring and it makes me disinterested, maybe that’s because I see it all the time and I’m just used to seeing my mum doing all the work but I just don’t think the shots look good enough to make a spectator think ‘whoah, this is amazing’ so I’m definitely going to be making this a film ONLY and then using the images that I will be making as stills.
I’m continuously collecting together shots of my mum and her life to be able to make the best film that I possibly can. A new layer which I have added to my film is archive images, here I got my mum to find images of her parents and of herself when she was younger just to make it that more personal as well as putting a face to the name with the interview. I have also got some footage of my own archive images of me when I was younger and also images alongside my older sister and my mum [my dad was always behind the camera]. I really like the footage that I have so far and think that it really makes my short film that much better allowing my audience in on my personal life and my mother’s life a bit more. This was really nice to see images of my grandparents as I have never met either of them, they both died before I was born, so seeing these images was a nice experience. It was also quite funny to look back at old family images of me and my sisters too. I like the idea of adding in these archive images as I really love the way those old images look, they are all old images from the 60s of my mums family.
I also have more footage of my mum. I went food shopping with her and have filmed her doing what she would usually do when food shopping, this was interesting to see the heavy bags that my mum lifts and how boring food shopping can be, especially when you have to do it alone. I really appreciate what my mum does and I want my work to reflect that, to show just how much she does for me and my family. The shots are coming together nicely and I am well into the editing process and have accumulated many shots to bring visuals to the audio interview that I did with my mum. One thing that I think I will need to change about my audio footage is the ending as it just kind of ends and I want it to have a better ending, something that will have more of an impact and that will also leave my audience thinking about the role that their own mothers have within their household.
After editing the clips together for a while now I am starting to really see progress and am liking what I have created so far. I still need to collect together some other shots of archive images as well as possibly some more footage of my mum just to bring the whole video together and to get the final bits needed. I am actually missing a bit of a chunk of footage within my short film where my mum is talking about her religion and why she didn’t bring me up in the same way that she was brought up which I haven’t made much footage for and am trying to come up with ideas as to how I would be able to fill that gap as my mum literally only has one small candle in our whole house that resembles her religion and the rest is pretty neutral. I also can’t film her parents as neither of them are alive and my mum only really has one proper image of them and that is in a family photo with my mums parents and two of her sisters. I think that I might be able to get some footage of my two Auntie’s as they are over from Scotland [from 9th-13th February] but I am unsure how relevant this will be in my short film. I have also got the idea of possibly going to a church and filming around there to fill in the gaps in my short film, I also actually have some shots from a Notre Dame church when I went to the South of France a few years ago which I may be able to use.
I’ve had a think and reviewed my short film so far and think that it will just be best to actually go to a local church and ask if I can film around to get the clips and shots that are needed. I couldn’t find the clips from when I went away on holiday with my parents and we visited a Notre Dame church so I will just have to go out and get the new footage as planned. I also don’t think that it would be relevant to get footage of my auntie’s as they are not mentioned at all throughout the interview and it just wouldn’t fit in with the rest of my short film. Overall, I am happy with how it looks so far and think that it has potential to look really good once everything is added and it is all done. Watching this short film come together and listening to what my mum has to say has given me some inspiration to create another short film about feminism with a voice over. I think that this will be beneficial to my project and will actually work out much better than a magazine would as I will be able to take stills from this project and put them into a photo book.
UPDATE: Over the half term I have been working on my short film and managed to get some extra footage of a church to fit in with the audio where my mum talks about her religion. I think that these shots have worked well in my short film and it is really starting to come together. I realized which editing that I still need to get some shots of my mum putting on her work clothes and getting ready for work as there is a section where she mentions what she does so this would fit in quite nicely. I will be getting these shots this week and adding them into my short film.
What next?
So after looking through this footage and putting together the whole video I wanted to keep up with my idea of parodying her role and mimicking what she does myself in a series of images. I want these images to be a reflection of how I see my mum and what she kind of represents to me. I am going to be staging images dressed in one of my mum’s dresses and I am going to change my hair around so that it looks like her hairstyle. I want to make these images stand out and to be interesting to look at, somehow I need to make cooking and cleaning look interesting. Taking inspiration from Cindy Sherman I want to make my new persona/character almost unrealistic, something that you would only ever see in movies or something. This will just make the images stand out more and will really emphasis that I am parodying the way women, specifically my mum, are perceived within our modern society. These images will be taken over the half term and my aim is to get at least two images from each part of my mums role. For example, I will be doing a shoot in the kitchen, one shoot will be in the bathroom cleaning, another will be in the living room cleaning and another shoot would also be food shopping. Little shoots that I want to hold big impact and to really send a clear message to my spectator about the role of women in modern society and how flawed it all is.
Short Film | An interview with my mum
Here is the finished short film all about my mum. I interviewed her asking various questions and from there have created a sequence of shots that correspond to what she is saying. I think that this short film has worked well and it gave me more of an insight as to what my mum thinks and as a personal study has really helped me to develop my thoughts on feminism as well as how I see my mums role compared to my own. This short film has given me inspiration to create more images based around the woman’s role within our Western society and what is expected of her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx5ayloQdsI
Short Film | Evaluation
I wanted to explain some of the shots I made in my short film in a bit more depth to show the meaning behind them. I feel that my short film has been successful and does represent my mother and many other women that follow the same traditional role as her. I wanted my short film to stand out and for the visuals to bring to life what my mother is saying in the interview. I really think that this project has given me a better understanding of my mother’s role and has really solidified for me the fight for equality in not only the Western world but the entire globe. I feel that this project has allowed me to develop my knowledge and understanding of other women fighting for their freedom and has helped me to understand more clearly that women need to fight for their rights and for our voices to be heard we need to stand up for what we believe in.
Image analysis 1
I put this clip in where my mum talks about her mother and how my mum’s role is harder than that of her own mother’s as she has a full-time job. The reason for this is actually because in the background of this is the location of my mum’s work and I wanted to have it as a subtle background just because I think that it looks better this way. I like this shot as my mum is concentrating on the road and not on the camera so it looks a lot more natural and she is acting as if the camera isn’t even there. I think that I was at an advantage throughout as my mum obviously feels comfortable around me and isn’t worried or nervous about what I am filming of her. I think being an insider for this project has helped me to create a much more precise and accurate project as I’ve known my mum my entire life and by now I understand her role and I am there everyday so I know what she does and doesn’t do. I feel that this clip is also interesting as it is slightly darker than a lot of my footage and stands out making my audience/spectator look at it more and want to analyse it more.
Image analysis 2
I love this still! This is an archive image that I decided to add into my project just to add more layers and to make it more personal for audience. The photo on the left is of my mother when she was younger and the one on the right is of me. I wanted to put the two next to one another as I find that we look so much alike in these images. I like this clip as it fits in to what my mum was talking about and the question I asked about how I was raised compared to how my mum was raised. I think that using archive images really helps with the development of my project and makes it more personal to me sharing old photographs of my childhood as well as looking more into the childhood of my mother. I this that the composition of this photograph is good as there is an even amount of space around the sides of the entire image and I also like how I have placed the images too. I wanted them to slightly overlap one another as I wanted the main elements of the images to be how similar I look to my mother when we were both younger. I chose to just put the images on a bed with a white cover as this is the room that my mum keeps the images, right next to her bed in a cupboard and in a small box. I think that this just makes it more authentic and adds yet another more personal layer to my project.
Image analysis 3
This shot is from a mini sequence that I created of my mum getting ready for work. Here the audio is my mum explaining her job and how many females there are at her work. I didn’t want to film her at work as the whole thing about my project is her life at home and her role within the household. I wanted my mum to be putting on her makeup as she usually does as it shows the expectation put on women to be glamorous and to look feminine. I just thought that this would be a nice extension on showing what are expected of women within our society as being the homemaker as well as constantly being glamorous. This has helped me with the idea for my stills mimicking my mums role and creating a new persona that parody’s her role and the traditional expectation of the role of women in our society. I also think that this is a good shot and I like the composition of a close up of my mum on the left hand side of the clip while the right hand side shows the mirror she is looking into adding more context to the still. I really like this still as it is clear and interesting to look at and one of the rare shots showing my mum at a closer angle than I usually do. Within my short film I have mainly shot from afar and looking at my mum from a distance but this shot makes it more personal and shows the actual features of my mum’s face more up close.
Image analysis 4
I decided to go down to St. Thomas’ church to get some footage around the building to go with the audio of my mum talking about her early life as a Catholic and her religion. I find that these shots bring to life what my mum is talking about and blends well with the whole film. I like this shot in particular as the painting in the frame is perfectly centered in the middle of the clip and I really like how the shadow falls as the light shines down on the painting. I also chose to film this particular painting because of the writing around it, ‘THE KING’S GOOD SERVANT BUT GOD’S FIRST’. I find this really interesting as it shows how devoted people are to their religion and that they would first follow God over any ruler. I also wanted to add this in kind of as a symbol of how my mum doesn’t really practice Catholicism. I really like that the light is shining down on the painting as many people see God as a ray of light and his light will shine down on you. This just brings the still together and adds to how many people see religion.
Image analysis 5
I added in archive images for my short film as it makes it a lot more personal and as I’m interviewing my mum I thought it would fit to share images of my early life and the life of my mum. I like the images that I have chosen as it shows happy moments in our lives and it matches with what my mum is talking about. It is also good for my spectator to see a little more of my life and my family and how I was brought up compared to how my mum had been brought up. I like adding in archive images as there is something quite unique about them, they are printed and show an older form of media which seems to be getting lost in the age of phones and storing images of computers.
Image analysis 6
I really like this shot of my mum cleaning as you aren’t really able to see her too clearly but the focus is on what she is doing and her surroundings. I like that my mum’s face isn’t visible in the shot as it adds a sense of mystery and makes my audience want to see her face and to find out a little more about her. I like the harsh lighting in this image with it being quite dark and just a ray of natural light coming through the large windows. I think that this still adds to the story of how my mum is continuously cleaning up after everyone and is even getting down on her hands and knees to make sure the flat is looking how she wants it to look. This shot does work really well within my short film and adds to the little details of what my mum does and how she does it. This also gave me some inspiration for my photo shoot as she always seems to be in awkward positions to try and get everything clean and she seems to always be juggling so many jobs at one time. I wanted to exaggerate this in my own work and this image has really helped me to develop this idea further.
Extra Clips Used | Research
Here are the videos that I got snippets from for my short film to add more context to what my mum is saying and to also give my short film more layers and allow my audience to visually see what my mum may be talking about and expressing.
