Evaluation of Film Studies Videos

Within our film studies part of the course we studied three theories and how they applied to film making; Freud, Lacan and Mulvey. After we analysed films with these theories we created our own film based on the theories. Me and Connie decided to make a short film based on Mulvey's male gaze and what it means to be under the male gaze and how women must be constantly sexualised and appealing and treat the camera as a heterosexual male. We shot in one location which was my house, We shot here because we wanted to show what a 'normal' day in the life of a girl is and then what the 'male gaze' day in the life is. In terms of mise-en-scene the location added a sense of verisimilitude to our film to make the issues of the male gaze rooted in the real world. In this way the choice of close-ups and wide shots of the female character would suggest what the male was actually seeing. 

We had aimed for the film to be an almost mirror image but with the difference being one is sexualised and the other isn't. The sexualised one is in nice underwear (mies-en-scene) and is very posed and 'sexy' we did this because we thought it would be an interesting way of expressing the difference. I think we made a good attempt at this with the variety of shots (cutting from close-up to midshot) and the difference in the opposition, to improve this we could have maybe used different shots (such as cutting to a reverse shot of a male) and created two entirely different films which could emphasise the over-exggaration of the male gaze. 

There are several parts of our video that could be done better; the editing could be smoother and the transitions between shots could be less obvious and visible. The editing in particular was not effective enough in suggesting the male viewpoint. The narrative we have isn't as strong as we wanted it to be and originally first intended but our message still comes across within the video itself. I feel like we could have created a greater contrast and the ending could've tied up the message of the film better instead of just leaving it on the message at the end. In terms of diegetic and non-diegetic sound, we could have made the film much better by using a soundtrack that was more sleazy and obviously masculine. In this way the message of the film would have been more obvious.

In my final summary I feel like we worked well in our pairing and we split the roles evenly and created a piece of work that we are both artistically involved in. I edited the film and Connie filmed it, we both had a hand in the storyboarding and the message of the film and we both chose a concept and theory we were interested in and we hope we have achieved a video that has expressed the idea of the theory and what the male gaze is.