On Tuesday, we ditched class and instead went to Daleen’s house to set up the lights and generally arrange the space, ready for filming on Friday.

The strip lights look great – they don’t quite fill the space with as much coloured light as I expected but that may be because it was quite bright outside which was interfering with the lighting. I believe that with a dedo lighting kit as well, the light within the space will be just perfect and help create that vivid and slightly gaudy look we are going for.

Our music video is intending to be a creative experiment in shot construction and lighting with a simplistic narrative as a driving force, one that positions the music video within a particular feminist view. However, our music video for ‘Electrical Ways’, at this stage of planning, is only just scraping the surface of the female experience in the 21st Century.

One of our inspirations comes from ‘Love Actually’, in scenes where Bill Nighy’s character, Billy Mack, is performing in his music video for ‘Christmas Is All Around’. He is surrounded by female performers who are clearly there to include sexually exploitive material – wearing very little and suggestively licking their lips. We are aiming to create a similar sort of scenario where the lead singer thinks he is a ‘sex god’ rockstar, however, the female in our video – the blow up doll – is uncomfortable with it all. The female doll in our music video is included to provoke particular questions about femininity and what it means for women to be objectified as sex objects, intentionally being used to represent the all too real experience of many women.

In ‘Music Video and the Politics of Representation’ buy Diane Railton and Paul Watson, Pink’s ‘Stupid Girls’ music video is aligned with much of recent feminist academic work on music video in that “it is concerned, on the one hand, to identify and critique images in which women are variously misrepresented, falsely represented, negatively represented, or simply not represented at all, and, on the other, to celebrate positive images of women.” (pg 18). Our music video is hoping to follow this example by showing how women are negatively represented and treated in a critiquing manner, whilst also addressing positive images of women – if you accept the blow up dolls deciding to fight back and murder their misogynistic boyfriend in the end as a positive representation.

As is also addressed in the reading, we are trying to touch on the fact that these images of women may not simply be either positive or negative, and that women may be a whole range of things without being labelled as one or the other – bad or good. We are trying to allude to the fact that these blow up dolls may accept rubbish treatment from their boyfriend, and they may decide to kill him, but either way it is their choice and they cannot be reduced to one ideology of what a female should be or do.

Luckily, after days of lengthy discussion and indecision, we now have a general narrative/theme/concept that will be running throughout our music video. The main goal is to create something visually enticing and fun, which has us experimenting with the neon lights and quirky filming spaces.

The story sees our main character, Nic, who is the lead singer of the band, walking down a suburban street with his girlfriend within the first verse, only to leave her outside, and enter the house. Once inside the house, he is faced with another, new girlfriend, giving the impression that he is a bit of a womaniser. However, instead of using two female actors to portray the girlfriends, we are using life-sized blow up dolls, blatantly demonstrating that the main actor sees women as sex objects and not real people, though they are meant to represent real people.

With the second girlfriend, we will use shots of Nic and the doll having fun amongst the interesting neon lights, taking part in mundane activities like eating ice cream, dancing and having Nic play the guitar to her. However, in a new scene with a vast change of mood; to Nic’s shock, they are joined by the first girlfriend, and before he knows it, they have both risen up against him to take him down for seeing women in the derogatory way that is displayed throughout the music video.

Progress has been made on the music video assignment front, in that we have decided on a song. Our music video will be made for a band that Darcy knows personally, called The Constables. They are a funk/alternative/rock group from Melbourne with their Spotify page noting their musical inspirations include the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Harts, The Delta Riggs and Confidence Man. The song we are using is called ‘Electrical Ways’, and when I listen to it, I imagine bright colours that pop off the screen, violent actions or dancing, and for some reason, a slow motion food fight.

I think it will be a truly fun music video to film and see come to life as the song is upbeat and catchy with lots of potential to be paired with interesting shot progressions.

I’ve always loved Ball Park Music, but had never seen this music video of theirs until recent. Directed by Dan Graetz, it seems like a music video that wouldn’t be too expensive to produce if you already had access to things like studios and lighting, which as RMIT students, we do. Despite the simplicity, it still provides a strong message and emotional punch, something that we aim to do create with our own music video,

Anton Corbijn’s ‘Control’ is stunning. By the end of the two hours, my heart was wrenched and I was gaping at the screen in disbelief (likely because I didn’t know much about Joy Division – including the death part). Something that I thought made this film particularly special and intriguing to me, personally, is that I didn’t take in a lot of context while watching it. The 1970s was a period of strikes and conflict, and Manchester was grimy and deserted, yet the film contains hardly any of this, also filtering out anything of the sorts of shrieking kids, ice-cream vans and lawnmowers. The film, to me, appears solely as a story about Ian Curtis, and much world-building context/background is unnecessary. There’s no way I can truly explain it, but I feel like ‘Control’ hit me in a way I didn’t expect due to the way it made me feel like Curtis was alone, and the world didn’t revolve around him but he was the world.

This is something I would like to explore when creating our own music video, how we can use context, or by stripping away context, to create a certain mood or feeling about a character.

Upon entering this studio, I had no idea what I was getting myself into, though I wasn’t particularly worried about the technical details as I know it’s unlikely I’ll ever go on to work on music videos professionally. However, after our first workshop on Monday, I am already intrigued and fascinated by the inner workings of music video productions and how how they are affected by budgets and production teams, as well various political and ethical considerations. My main aim in ‘Egg Hunting’ is to be able to step into the role of a director more, as in the past I have always stayed relatively quiet in group assignments and focused myself on background/planning work. This also applies to group work situations in this studio, where I hope to learn how to govern myself better amongst others who all have differing opinions and ideas. My goal is to learn how to stay focussed in a collaborative environment and be able to speak up and contribute as much as my fellow group members do, so that all my ideas are heard, instead of letting other people drive the group completely. Otherwise, I am very excited to be able to express myself creatively within this studio in a way that I have never been able to before. Though I haven’t thought about it extensively in the past, I definitely fit into the category of people that listen to a song and start visualising a compatible music video in their head, or think about a place in a movie that the song would be perfect for. I am interested to see whether this is a generally smooth sailing process of us being able to create whatever we set out to do, or whether we will be largely restricted by factors like budget and time. I’m hoping that I will learn, throughout the studio, how to navigate this creative process and experiment with techniques that don’t require a $10k budget.