I originally came up with this idea in class when my mind wandered into thinking about sex education. Most of the videos shown in school are cheesy, outdated, or narrow minded. I expressed my idea to Emily and she was really excited about it. When I read the requirements of the final this was the first thing I thought of.
Creating a sex education video was our original idea, but due to time constraints attempting to keep up with all the assignments we altered it according to the material we felt we could get ahold of in order to make a quality project.
As we were working the project continued to form into it's own beast. We wanted to tie in comments about Planned Parenthood and other sources to get raw information about sex, but it didn't fit for the short that we ended up creating.
Here is how we went about to make this film. We spent hours on google and youtube looking up videos, ads, and songs that were all related to sex. Emily had her dad record VO and filmed interviews with her mom and her sister (the tape quality was warped so the footage didn't make it into the project). I interviewed Sophia and Tiffany. We both met up together and interviewed Brenda and Brendan.
Editing was pretty intricate. Not only did we have to upload various videos from the internet, but I found that I had to edit the clips in order to get the parts that best proved our points. We went through all the interviews and picked the strongest points. I then made a rough cut and Emily and I got together to clean it up and add music.
Emily and I were really excited with our ending product. We had sounds of a man and women breathing heavily in the beginning to catch people's attention. We had videos being used to provide a visual representation as well as covering the cuts in the video. We thought we had an interesting trailer that summarized various different topics within the idea of sex and media.
Emily and I were both really nervous before our final showed. We spent 20+ hours on it and grown pretty fond of it. I both wanted the feedback and didn't want it because I had come to be so proud of our project.
The critique was really eye opening. Everyone in the class noticed things that I had never considered. I purposely made the three interviews look different because I thought it would stimulate visual interest, but it ended up confusing the audience. I would have never thought of that!
Our only male had a flower background. This background was used in one of his and my episodes of "Scientific Station" on Columbia Access Television. We used it because it was funny (we thought it'd match our light hearted trailer) and because it represented his fascination with botany. This was a sort of inside joke that confused the audience. The clip didn't fit with the other interviews and they wondered whether to take Brendan seriously because of the background. Again, I would have never thought of that.
I thought the critique was very useful for future projects. I liked the project before and still do. There wasn't really any positive comments on our project so it didn't turn out very well. We worked really hard so it was a little agonizing to realize that it wasn't as high quality as we thought. I would have liked to know what parts of the video were good so I could remember to use those skills again. I got the feeling that the overall reaction to the project was negative, so maybe I just need to start fresh, which is a lesson in itself.
If I were to do this project in the future as a big project with more money, subjects, and time I would have focused on one specific topic and attempted to visit the whole realm of options. This was more of a summery of the topics to be explored rather than an in depth look.
One subject that is possible and that fascinating to me is the depiction of women in the media, but that issue has been thoroughly explored so I'd rather focus on territory less trodden. In our "Trans Cinema" event we heard that all of our panelists were frustrated by the poor depiction of Trans people. I would enjoy going into LGBT representation in the media.
The topic that came up in this project that I would love to go further with was the idea that the media says "Yes! Have sex ALL THE TIME!" and society says "NO! Don't talk about it, do it, or even think about it." I would love to do a project on these two topics.
Overall the project was a huge learning experience. I learned to create an idea and watch it morph into something completely different. I also took constructive criticism and learned to deal with being the only ones to enjoy our project. I'm glad to have this under my belt and look forward to continue making people shudder with my obsession with sex.
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