Attitudes and the representation of women.

Attitudes and the representation of women. (A response to views of Sexy Girlfriend Joann)
Women within music video's have increasingly become tools of sexual promiscuity, a symbolic reference of wealth, power and status amongst various other connotations, however, as times are changes mens sexuality is being more and more frequently discussed. In response to some of the extreme views and opinions that we have received regarding Sexy Girlfriend Joanne we are now being inclusive of the female participants within our project.
The following are various quotes from members of the local town regarding their personal views to the images of women within the media.
comments and Responses.
-"Men see us as objects and we should be represented in a stronger way, we are not sex objects"
Holly Webb.
- While it is true that women are often represented in negative ways we do feel that voyeurism is not just male over female, instead we feel that women are increasingly becoming more dominant in female music videos.

-"Overly sexualised, objectifies women"
Savana Whitfield
- We do agree that women can be represented in an overly sexualised way, however we do feel that it is important to note that artists such as Niki Minaj will often represent themselves as objects of sexual desire. The video Anaconda for example features close to pornographic imagery displayed by Minaj.

"you say that being portrayed sexually is a negative thing, why?"
Richard Lunn
- We do not feel that all representation of sexuality is negative, instead we feel that the exploitation of sexual imagery to generate interest in a media piece is not something that should be encouraged. Sexuality is something that we feel should only be addressed if it has real relevance to the media piece.

Sexy Girlfriend Joann.

Sexy Girlfriend Joann.
The representation of women in our media piece is one of the most important factors as the song focuses around a one-sided between the narrator and his girlfriend (we are unsure if the girlfriend is really a girlfriend or just a friend, we opted with girlfriend, however the video works either way).
 We decided to represent women through the use of Sexy Girlfriend Joann for various reasons;
- Negative images and stereotypes for women.
- Suits the abstract rock genre.
- Gives an alternate approach to relationships.
The actual representation of women in our piece is through a book album in which we took various images and constructed an identity without any actual physical presence. We felt that the best way to give representation of women was to leave room for audience interpretation, instead of giving a set and obvious idea surrounding women, we thought it would be more interesting to allow the audience to generate their own idea of women.
 NEGATIVE IMAGES AND STEREOTYPES FOR WOMEN.
Women in rock, we feel, tend to be represented in a negative image, whilst we disagree with this, we also felt it was important to address this concept. To achieve this we had the female stand our male character up. This suggests a sense of aggression towards women, something we feel is reflected in the lyrics of the song.
SUITS THE ABSTRACT ROCK GENRE.
In an attempt to suit the abstract feeling that rock genre tends to follow we decided to remove the female role entirely and replace her with a sense of absence. This is where we came up with the idea for Sexy Girlfriend Joann, named so to represent a sense of superficiality.
GIVES AN ALTERNATE APPROACH TO RELATIONSHIPS.
We decided to stick with Sexy Girlfriend Joann as we felt that this gave us a different and unseen (for the most part) approach to female representation.

Concept Research

we are doing research

Research and Planning.

CD designs.
For our final piece we are required to create two pieces of print media. A poster to advertise our band and  CD cover with at least 4 faces and 6 images.
Below you can see our first draft for the CD cover and the research and planning that is going into its development.

This is the original idea for the cover photo, it relates to our as in our original draft as we were focusing on the representation of emotional turmoil through everyday objects. The mirror would smash when our actor became distressed and the rose would die over the course of the video. An additional idea we have is to have an image of a photograph burning which would be more relatable to our actual video.

This image is likely to be the final image used for our cover photo, if we go with this concept. We used Photoshop to colour correct to darken the rose's reflection and tidy the cracks in the mirror. We used the rose on a black stand as these colours are likely to be our final colour scheme.





The image below shows our first draft for the internal section of our album cover. It shows the CD holder on the left and a booklet and a booklet holder on the right side. The colour scheme is not accurate yet as we are likely to change the colours to black and red.




Posted By Scott and Hayden.

What changed.

When we came to edit our work we came to the horrific realization that making a music video is actually really hard, we were constantly having to change and adapt our plan. Every action we undertook had lead to a re-think in order for it all to come together in the editing. It's because of this that our final piece will look different to the original plan. This was expected, however we were not aware of the extent.

Josh Frampton.

Josh Frampton, for those who don't know, is a member of the band Against the Tide from which we took our song.
We asked for his opinion on our album booklet, this is what he said; "It's something that most teenagers fantasise about. Being in a band and I feel very honoured to say that I was in one that, for the most part, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing the songs, I enjoyed the recording process but, above all, I enjoyed the live performing. I think we all did. Especially when we got the crowd involved with what we were doing. At every live gig we performed, we did a crowd jump in the middle part of a song called "Within Me" which always made us feel good I think. There's something about people actively jumping to something you've created. (Especially when, at one gig, the mass of people jumping in one room caused the building's fire alarm system to go off!) As for I Won't Die For You, Joe brought the song to a practice one day and I automatically fell in love with it. It was Joe's first major writing contribution to the group but i could tell it's potential when Joe first played the riff and taught us the rest of the track. It took us a little while to complete it due to a creative argument with part of the song but we managed it. I also had to re-write the lyrics due to Joe's original lyrics being near impossible and, well, lyrically....interesting. The lyrics in the chorus, however, are Joe's original lyrics so about 90% of the lyrics have been re-written. But it was always a fun song to play live and we always enjoyed doing it too which is important. It continues to be one of my favourite live songs and I even play it acoustically at solo gigs! But every band needs some kind of love song and this was ours. And that was fine because it was heart felt, passionate and technical. But above all, it was fun and that's what counts." -Josh Frampton [Vocalist for Against the Tide]

Being Creative.

As we are putting our film together we are finding new and different ways to edit and compose our video. An example of this is our choice of editing in the narrative; in a mid section we have decided to separate one shot into four different shot. Although all four of the shots are from the same angle we have changed the speed and continuity by cutting a second out of the video at three points. This effect is done in time with the beat of the music which we feel makes the video more immersive and therefore engage the audience more; this was an issue we identified with rock music video's in earlier posts.
 In addition, we feel that this better represents the theme of the video. The disjointed aspect of the music is reflected in the editing, instead of the smooth flowing video we have chosen to create discord and better reflect the music.
 A secondary reason for this particular edit is that the usual convention for music video's is that it flows faultlessly will little to no creativity, one shot flows to another and so on. As we doing a video for a Rock song we felt we should better reflect the Rock and Roll attitude, not conforming to various social roles, we feel this will again help us to connect to our target audience.
 The final reason for us to use this technique was to change a lengthy shot into various shorter shots with different editing styles between them, this makes the shot less dull and more interesting for its audience.

This was posted by : Scott, Hayden and Ian Murray.