Empowerment

The brief

​

During our discussions at the beginning of Term 1, one issue came up which particularly interested us, which was the way that some celebrities seem to sending out a good message but might just be doing it as virtue signalling to get positive publicity, when elsewhere they are behaving just the same as everyone else - making them hypocrites. Our brief was therefore to try and work with that idea.

​

How we decided to respond to the brief

In the end we decided to take our inspiration from the British group Little Mix. The act is composed of four singers: Jesy Nelson, Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall and Liegh-Anne Pinnock. The group sing pop songs and are famous not only in the United Kingdom but internationally. Most of their fans are younger and older teens - and most of them are women. They therefore have some responsibility to those teenagers who look up to them as role models because they might imitate everything they do - particularly as Little Mix are not only busy making records but also posting on social media including on Instagramwhere they have more than 11 million followers.

As a group we decided to subvert a recent video of theirs because we felt the message it was sending out was ambiguous. The song is called ‘’Strip’’ and the lyrics are about female empowerment and the need to like your own bodies, and celebrate how natural you are. But in the video the girls don’t look natural at all. They have all had their hair done and are wearing makeup, and although their underwear is more utility than seduction, it’s still top class branded wear. Also the film is in stylised black and white. How ‘natural’ is that?! To our minds this contradicts the message of the song, which is hypocritical of Little Mix particularly because of all they have had to say about fat shaming, anorexia and anxiety, etc.

So we decided to make our own version of the video in which we really didlook natural. The plan was to begin with a short vox pop with the voices of young women telling us what the word ‘empowerment’ means to them. We’d then film a group of girls dancing in some real casual wear such as pyjamas rather than something bought by a costume department, and we’d also film in colour to make the whole thing as ‘real’ as possible. The final idea was to mix a little (a little mix  get it?!) of the original film in with ours so viewers could compare, and recognise the hypocrisy in the original. 

​

What we think of the end result

The end result has energy and charm, but is nor quite what we planned. First we failed to get the vox pop and instead had to include only one definition of empowerment - from a dictionary. One of things we learned was that getting people to talk to you on film is very hard, and so we did not leave enough time for it, and in the end could only meet the deadline by leaving that street interview element of the film out of the cut. Had we planned better we would not have made this mistake. Another problem was that we did not film in a ‘real’ location - like a bedroom for example - but at University instead. The clothes we are wearing are at least real and more natural than those in the Little Mix film, but a more intimate location would have worked better. We did not manage to find any volunteers to do the dancing so we did it ourselves. But rather than being a problem we think this works well. We are very comfortable together and come from diverse backgrounds, and therefore look very different - which means the film feels more inclusive than it might otherwise have looked. At the last moment we decided to keep our scenes black and white like in the orginal. This was so the splicing between the two would not clash so much. But by deciding to do that we lost another ‘natural’ element from our version, as in natural colour. The final change we would make would be to work with the words on the bodies at the end. We show a glimpse of Little Mix with words painted on them, but we could have painted words on us as well, choosing words with something to say that would help our message.

​

Three specific things that we learned

• In any group all the group members need to be equally committed - or the project will not work. 

• Film production is complicated, so allow much more time to do things than you would otherwise.

• Stay in touch with your producer - in this case Rishabh - so they can check that you are not straying from the original plan too much.

​

Conclusion

Having to coordinate so many things - such as studio space and cameras etc. - helped us become more organised, which will help us in the professional world. Having an external client - The Samosa - also forced us out of our comfort zone in a way that has made us more confident. We also now have technical skills we never had before, so all in all we found the project extremely helpful in making us progress both creatively and professionally.

​

Sexualisation & Society - A Samosa Media and UEL Journalism Project

​