The Process:
For this NFT project we all had different roles. Editing the video was Niamh’s role. She started by importing all the videos onto Adobe premier and then cut each clip at specific times to make it look as though she was walking towards the camera while her outfits changed. We then decided which music to use as a group and uploaded it to the video. Overall I feel that the editing process was not as time consuming as expected as we all had our own things to work on within the film.
In my group, it was decided that I was going to find the sound effects for the video. This included finding sound effects that contained sounds of animals on a farm, natural ambience, a sci-fi whoosh effect, keyboard typing noises, retro video game sounds and more.
For these I researched different websites for free, copyright free, downloadable sound effects. For these I got them from a few different places.
Mixkit
My personal favourite site was called mixkit and had a wide variety of sound effects that you could download for free. Mixkit has sound effects for different headings such as transitions, nature, technology, animals and games. Below are examples of how many sound effects Mixkit has to download.
I mainly used the game section of sound effects as my group needed retro sounding opening sound effects for the video. I also found some transition swoosh sound effects, keyboard typing sound effects and animal noises.
For this experiment we decided to use our photos in which we took in the studio. We are going to manipulate the photos in photoshop to create a 3D effect. We done this by duplicating the images and then used the fx tool on the duplicated layer to turn off the green and blue channels on the layer. Once we done that I moved the bottom layer slightly to the left to create this 3D effect.
Final Outcome:
Overall I feel as if this idea worked well due to the fact that we decided to present all the photos together as the final outcome. Additionally I also feel that it may be eye-catching to the viewer because the way in which the 3D effect worked. However I do think that it would have been more successful if we had the model positioned exactly the same in all 4 images.
The Process
For this experiment we had to make a digital image out of our footage from our NFT video. We decided to edit the images in photoshop to make them more interesting.
To edit these images I duplicated the image and then used the fx tool on the duplicated layer to turn off the green and blue channels on the layer. I then moved the bottom layer slightly to the left to create this 3D effect.
Edited Outcomes
Final Outcome
After editing all four images we decided to put them in a row next to each other. I think to make this image better she could be in the same position in all of the images with the same shade background and the images could be better quality as they are quite small and low resolution.
GIF
Storyboard Plan
First we’re going to start of with a wide shot and then zoom into a person wearing a 70’s inspired outfit (flares and a crop top), after that there is going to be an outfit change with a clip shot through a door or a mirror. Next, there is going to be an outfit change into a 80’s inspired outfit (mom jeans and a bomber jacket), then there will be a change into a 90’s inspired outfit (black dress?). The clips will be shot with the model facing the camera and the clips will cut between outfits as the model walks forward towards the camera. The model will then change into a 2000’s inspired outfit (tracksuit) followed by an outfit inspired by current fashion (baggy jeans and a top).
Embroidery and Narrative
Artists who use embroidery
Debbie Smyth
Textile artist Debbie Smyth is best known for her stitched illustrations. By plotting pins with acute accuracy and then stretching thread between them, she creates work that is beautiful and somewhat disconcerting; the boundaries of textile art, fine art sketches, embroidery, and illustration are well and truly blurred.
My Embroidery
For this experiment we had to use materials that related to Jersey and the history and community of Jersey. I decided to use this image as it is a well known building and business that is still there. I decided to keep it simple and just stitch on words that I cut out from the text that was originally below the image. I chose to only use the identifying words in the text, such as the business name and the year the image was taken so that it didn’t take away from the actual photo.
A storyboard is a visual outline for the video you are planning to make, they are usually hand drawn, however in recent times storyboards have been created digitally in computer software. The format of a storyboard is usually chronological, helping the creators visualise the video before filming begins. Storyboards also include notes about what is meant to happen in the video, like little captions describing the process from beginning to end. A completed storyboard may look similar to a comic strip, it is like a visual script for the production team to fully plan how they want the video to look. Click here for more on storyboards.
Our group created the storyboard below to help us plan how we wanted our video shoot to go, describing the different shots and how we imagined them playing out on screen. Firstly, we started with the simple title of ‘Women’ for our NFT film – however, later in the process we changed out idea to the title ‘WomanKind’; a sort of play on words to mankind while also hinting at the stereotypes of women needing to be sweet and innocent, in other words ‘kind’. Our opening shot is planned to be of a wooden door, large and imposing, taking up the entire frame. We plan on having someone open the door from the other side to lead the camera into the first room, we also aim to edit this first sequence with a black and white filter to represent the timeline it portrays. We plan for our second scene to show a woman, dressed in typical early 1900’s attire with an apron, whisking something in a bowl walking through her kitchen. We will set the camera on a tri-pod in the centre of the room and follow the woman as she moves, before seeing her stop to put on a ‘Votes for Women’ protest sash. We want the satire of the ‘innocent housewife’ to juxtapose with her later fierce and strong mood as she walks off through a different door on the other side of the room. Our third and forth scenes will follow the same filming format, however in the second our model will pick up a ‘Women’s Rights’ sign before leaving, wearing a 60’s/70’s inspired dress and edited with a dull saturation (colour appearing as time moves on, and more rights for women are put in place). Our last shot is planned to show our model in a idealistic world of freedom, walking into frame and looking at herself in a mirror, feeling confident within her femininity and loving herself without it needing to be sexualised for the male gaze. We plan for our model to look straight at the camera lens and smile before leaving through a final door into a world where she can feel confident and comfortable.
Who – The model we are using for this video shoot is the same woman we had in our initial photoshoot images. Caitlin has a timeless look about her, she is also an actress who is comfortable in front of the camera and has confidence in portraying the different emotions we want to convey; eg, sadness, anxiety, excitement, happiness.
Where – We plan on using one of our group member’s grandmother’s home for our video shoot due to its vast space, rooms, doorways and availability for use. The house we aim to film in is also decorated with similar regal furniture and wallpaper as the work of Lissa Rivera, who is our main source of inspiration for the project.
When – We aim to conduct this video shoot on Thursday October 14th as the weather is meant to be bright and sunny, resulting in perfect natural lighting for the shots we want to film in the kitchen (a room with very big windows). Additionally, on this day we all have a free period last lesson which provides the perfect time to film before it gets too dark.
How – We are planning to film using my Canon camera and tri-pod so all the footage is in one place and it is easy to find for editing. We will attempt to create transitions between doorway to room – however if this is not possible in the space we are in, we have a plan B on how to film our video, using a simpler format.
Why – We want to create this video to shed light on the decades of struggle that women have gone through to get equal rights, we know that we are lucky enough to live on an island where equality is noticed and seen, for the most part, however we also realize there are many countries and areas where women do not have the same rights as men and still need to fight everyday for the privileges that should be theirs for free. We want to create a video showing a timeline of women’s rights activists during the different waves of feminism, connoting ideas of freedom and passion for what they believe in.
As a group, knowing we wanted to explore feminism, we decided to use this opportunity to create a video showing empowerment in the world of women. Our initial idea was to use one girl throughout the video and have her walking through doors that lead to different stages of feminism. She would start in in kitchen and would represent the fist wave of feminism (women’s suffrage) as well as the women of the time, hence why she would be in the kitchen, the stereotype and mostly reality at the time. She would then walk through a door, walk through time, to the seventies introducing the second wave of feminism. This stage would have more colour and saturation implying the good changes that had come, however not fully. And through the last door would come not another stage of fighting for equality but a hypothetical world where women feel free, safe and happy.
Each stage lasting ten seconds would add up to 30 seconds, our aim being to represent how women have fought over the century but showing it in a gentle way. As for audio our initial idea was to change the music for each stage, however, we decided that instead, having three snippets of speeches of women at he time as well as empowering music would be much more emotional and powerful.
On Wednesday the 29th of September we took part in an embroidery workshop with Yulia Makeyeva, an emerging multi-disciplinary artist who grew up in Russia and is now based in Jersey. Yulia has a background in art history, silversmithing and jewellery making, however turned her full attention to art in 2019. She likes to use photography to help her observe textures, patterns and shapes in everyday objects – she uses these observations to create artwork that is unique and unexpected. Yulia experiments with different mediums in her artwork, using sewing, painting, drawing and photography to create dynamic pieces with storylines and meanings. She has an interest in concepts of memory, responsibility, stereotypes, borders, boundaries and multiculturalism, and is also working on a range of projects involving historical research.
A statement from Yulia reads ‘I like to push the boundaries of the ordinary. Exploring the capabilities of materials, I learn through making. I draw inspiration from my home, family and surroundings – any texture, object, light movement, story, music, etc. can become a starting point. At a research stage, before making a decision, I play with the idea in my head and with the material in my hands, tactility is very important. Actual making process comes further, usually in the form of labour-intensive contemplative repetition. What do I want to say with my art? I want to reveal a different angle and engage the viewer into an active dialogue with the world around.’
During our embroidery workshop, we did some further research into our project by looking through various collections of embroidered work in books around the class. In one of these books we discovered this piece by Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh called ‘The Bugs and the Lovers’, created from a series of drawings they made together in 2005. Two pink roses are the main focus of their piece, with various insects dotted around the watercolour flowers which symbolize the stereotypes of romanticism, women being delicate and frail. It is difficult to see from the image, however sewn into the painting is an outline of a couple making love, with emphasis on the woman’s face and body – there is obvious irony in Amer’s subject matter choice. The pink colour of the flowers and the symbolic metaphors for a woman’s innocence and fragility are juxtaposed by the explicit embroidery that overlaps, it creates the impression of women being comfortable within themselves in a society that still views them as weak and naive. This piece links to our idea on showing the representation of women as it evolves through the different waves of feminism, when deciding what to sew for my embroidered piece I took inspiration from the flowers and pink tones.
During this workshop, we were given the task to create a piece of embroidery inspired by our NFT Community project – taking inspiration also from ‘The Bugs and the Lovers’, I wanted to create a piece with a soft colour palette of pink and white to represent innocence and purity, some stereotypical qualities of women. We had a range of materials to work with, the main being some large fabric panels from the People Make Jersey exhibition which were placed on tables around the room for us to use in our pieces. I had the idea to cut out different words and phrases that linked with the idea of women’s rights and feminism, such as ‘who risked her life’ and ‘house workers’. I wanted to sew these phrases onto a piece of fabric that linked to Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh’s work, using the motif of flowers for fragility. After gathering all of my words, fabrics and threads I decided to lay them all out in an order that created a story – I came up with the verse ‘woman; forced hope. her sacrifice, gratitude.’ The meaning I wish to be interpreted from these words is one of justice and fighting – the forced hope of generations of women fighting for the same thing year after year, the sacrifices made by suffragettes and other freedom fighters, the gratitude we feel for those who have fought for us in the past; women.
The aim of our workshop was to combine traditional methods of making art (analogue), such as embroidery and stitching with digital media like photography to create a short stop animation movie as a GIF. My GIF above was created on Adobe Photoshop using these steps –
1. Create layer for each image
2. Window > timeline
3. Select > Create Frame Animation
4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers
5. Timeline > select Forever
6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720 x 720 pixels
My GIF shows the process of my embroidery, however it also tells a story of repetition – hinting at the years of constant fighting for equality through the 19th and 20th century. The overlapping images the come together one by one create a dynamic animation conveying ideas of the same thing happening (or not happening) over and over again. Furthermore, as each new word or phrase is sewn on it gives the impression of time moving forwards, more and more women standing up for what they believe in and fighting for the rights they deserve. I wanted to convey a sense of irony also in my piece, using colours like pink to juxtapose the hard hitting message within my text. The motif of flowers that also features hints towards the stereotypes of women, the metaphor of a flower is often used to describe a women to make her seem feeble and weak – the opposite to the women described in my verse. Additionally, I wanted to use different coloured cotton and thread to sew the words on to the fabric -I began by using a thick red wool to sew in the word ‘forced’, again irony as I had to force the needle through the two fabrics to sew them together, but also symbolic of the struggles and pain that past and present activists have to go through, representing passion/blood//danger. Other materials I used to sew into my piece were thin threads of cotton in different shades of pink, showing repetition and symbolism of women throughout. The flimsiness of the cotton also adds to the idea of a stereotypical woman’s place, doing jobs around the house that do not require strength or muscle – all creating a pun towards the representation of women throughout history.
Cindy Sherman (1954-present) is an American filmmaker and photographer who focuses her work on critiquing themes of gender and identity. In her early years Sherman created fine art, however abandoned painting for photography while attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, and in 1976, moved to New York to pursue a career as a photographer. Her work has been the subject of many museum exhibitions, including those at The Museum of Modern Art in 2019, and at the National Portrait Gallery, in London during 2019. Sherman captures self portraits, her most notable body of work are her ‘Untitled Film Stills’ which feature the artist herself as a model in various costumes and poses, and are her portrayals of female stereotypes found in film, television, and advertising – all captured in black and white. In the film stills, rather than quoting from recognizable movies, Sherman suggests genres, resulting in characters that emerge as personality types instead of specific actresses. The first six images of the series depict the same blonde actress at various stages of her career. Later, the character appears as a seductress, waiting at home for her lover – then afterwards Sherman might be seen as the trope of the diligent, stay-at-home wife who remains attractive and available to her husband.
Sherman’s Film Stills have been described as “a hybrid of photography and performance art that reveals femininity to be an effect of representation.”. Sherman states “I like making images that from a distance seem kind of seductive, colourful, luscious and engaging, and then you realize what you’re looking at is something totally opposite,” she reflected. “It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It’s more challenging to look at the other side.” Sherman on being a female photographer; “There’s a theory that there were so many women photographers at the time because we felt nobody else was doing it. We couldn’t or didn’t really want to go into the male-dominated painting world, so since there weren’t any artists who were using photographs, we thought, ‘well, yeah, let’s just play with that.’ “
I love the way Sherman can create such a strong narrative in her images, each one tells a story and forms some sort of message towards the representation of women. Her style of photography is so interesting to me, her images are intimate and close, allowing the observer to feel connected to her scene. The black and white filter also evokes a sense of melancholy in her work, and her exaggerated ‘feminine poses’ seem to mock the portrayal of women in a patriarchal society. Her work holds strong links to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, and her ideas on ‘The Male Gaze’ stating; visual media that respond to masculine voyeurism tends to sexualise women for a male viewer. This sexism within the film industry is what Sherman has captured in her Untitled Film Stills, shedding light on the negativity of some feminine stereotypes.
In our project, we really want to take inspiration from Sherman’s series of images by replicating her stereotypical style and narratives. The ‘house-wife’ character is one we wish to represent in our NFT film, using ideas surrounding what stereotypically ‘should be a woman’s place’ and filming in the setting of a kitchen. We plan on our images holding hints towards a woman’s innocence eg, wearing white flowing dresses etc to show her purity and goodness. As we plan on using these shots in the early stages of our project, the timeline will begin in the first wave of feminism and will hold reference to the suffragette/suffragist movement of the late 1800’s – mid 1900’s.
Clare Rae is an artist and photographer from Melbourne Australia, in her photographic practice Clare explores ideas of performance and gesture to interrogate and subvert dominant modes of representation. Her work is informed by the feminist theory, and presents an alternate and often awkward experience of subjectivity and the female body, usually the artists’ own. In 2017, Rae undertook an artist’s residency with Archisle: the Jersey Contemporary Photography Programme to research the archive of Claude Cahun works held by Jersey Heritage. It was during this time that she created the photographic series ‘Never Standing on Two Feet’, paying a homage to avant-garde artist Claude Cahun (1894-1954), drawing upon Cahun’s photographic archive to explore the female body, self-hood, ritual and the male gaze in cultural and geographical landscapes.
A quote from Clare Rae, on ‘Never Standing on Two Feet’ – “My series, Never standing on two feet, considers Cahun’s engagement with the physical and cultural landscapes of Jersey, an aspect of her work that has received little analysis to date. The photographs Cahun produced in Jersey are intimate. They explore an idea of self within the immediate environment and were produced in collaboration with her lover, Marcel Moore. Many threads of inquiry emerged for me while viewing the archive: Cahun’s performative photographic gestures; the nature of photographic performance for a lover; and the repercussions of imaging a woman’s body aging over time, to name a few.”
I really enjoy the way Rae’s self-portraits explore the coastal geography and Neolithic monuments of Jersey, relating body to place and creating a sense of mystery. Similar to how Cahun used self-portraiture to subvert the dominance of the male gaze, Rae has created a series of images that tease at the idea of women’s bodies being objectified, and women fighting back against this. As her portraits show parts of her body hidden away by the landscape, it conveys the ideas of 3rd Wave Feminism and the fighting women did for equal rights (including pay, reproductive rights, the ERA etc) during the early 90’s and 2000’s. The monochrome filter on these photographs creates an interesting atmosphere of mystery and sadness, representing the oppression of women still holding significance in society as time moves on.
For our community NFT project, we wish to take inspiration from Clare Rae’s ideas on women standing up for what they believe in and taking action towards their oppression. We have the idea to represent Women’s Rights Activism throughout the late 20th Century, using Rae’s technique of hiding parts of a woman’s body to make a statement on its constant sexualisation. We wish to do this by using a woman’s rights poster in shot, which will be lifted to hide our models torso as she walks past the camera – demonstrating activism, and hinting towards the exploitation of women.
Lissa Rivera is a photographer based in New York, she received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, where she became fascinated with the social history of photography and the evolution of identity, sexuality and gender in relationship to material culture. Rivera grew up in a small town, without much excitement or things to do, therefore she had to create this excitement and wonder herself in order to capture images of meaning and significance. Most of Rivera’s images are staged and hold an almost regal atmosphere to them – her style of photography is expressive and vibrant, something our group wants to portray during our NFT film. Our group discovered Rivera from her project ‘Beautiful Boy’, where Rivera and her domestic partner use staged portraiture as an expressive way to explore male/female identity and reclaim a personal definition of beauty.
A statement Lissa Rivera made about her project in ‘Metal Magazine’; “Beautiful boy was born out of a series of conversations between my friend BJ and I about femininity, fantasy and gender. At the time we were not in a romantic relationship and had no idea of the future. On a subway ride home from a queer film screening, BJ (who is now my sweetheart) confessed that they preferred to be feminine and often wore dresses. In college he was able to be open about his gender expression, but since moving to the city and taking on a new job, it had become more complicated. We spoke about the struggles that we both felt with femininity, how femininity is still considered weaker and less valuable in our culture. I offered to take BJ’s portrait, so that he could see himself.” Additionally, Rivera states “It is important to show his femininity as strength. I want to feel empowered as well, and to have an intimate muse. Together we investigate feminine fantasies presented throughout the history of photography and cinema. The project is a way to “step inside” images that we have found alluring and examine what it is like to live each scenario out. We explore both our captivation and our ambivalence towards these depictions of femininity. By presenting my partner within the lineage of great beauties and populating the media with our images, we are reclaiming in our voice what is attractive and beautiful.”
I love the way that Rivera can capture such innocence and bravery in these images – they inspire and break gender norms that societies have created over the years. The compositions of her photographs hold symmetry and leading lines which draw the observers view towards the main subject. I really enjoy Rivera’s use of monochrome colours in her images, the blocky pinks, blues and browns hint at ideas of simplicity in a world of chaos – where one can truly be themselves without judgement or oppression. This theme is one we wish to take from Rivera’s work, the idea of being free as yourself, feeling comfortable in your femininity and allowing yourself to feel confident without the need for it to be sexualised.
For our NFT project, we are aiming to take inspiration from Rivera’s regal setting and style of photography. The curtains, chandeliers and extravagant wallpapers are all aspects we wish to replicate during our photoshoot due to their link with confidence, power and authority – all of which a woman must fight hard to have. We have the idea to use Rivera-style videos/images at the end of our community project, representing the timeline of women’s rights with this ending demonstrating empowerment and luxury.
