Representation of Women in the Music Video

As our singer was female, we felt very strongly that we wanted to portray a positive image of women in our video. This meant rejecting many conventions of modern female artists. 

In many films of the 50's, the
actress was merely there to be
 beautiful and rarely had any
depth of character.

The most common is giving priority to the artist's beauty above anything else in the video. E.g. every macro and micro element is used to make the artist look beautiful or sexy. Interestingly, a convention not widely used by male artists. This convention is also true of album covers. 
(see Album Cover Research post for more detailed discussion)
We could have followed this convention and still stayed true to the era we were setting it in. Many films of this age show women as glamorous, unruffled 'goddesses', serene but with limited personalities. However this was not the image of women we wanted to portray.

We wanted our character 'Caro' to be fun, flirty and silly. She could be beautifully made up as a 50's star, but she didn't stay perfectly still so as not to disturb her hair-do! To achieve this 'fun' character we cast a girl who is naturally funny, willing to be a bit ungraceful in order to get a laugh, but could also show a glamorous side for the performance sections. Another reason we cast Ashlea as Caro was her amazing figure. Just as a stick thin figure is supposedly popular in today's society, curves were coveted in the 50's.

 

Christina Hendricks played Joan Holloway 

in Mad Men and was part of the re-

popularisation of the curvy figure - with
the success of the show she stayed

true to her natural shape  

Caro's audience is wide ranging. The 15 year old trumpet player in our video is a huge fan, as is my Grandma! So we realised we had an obligation to the younger audience to support a positive image of women of normal size. 

As we set our video in an era when women's lives were very domesticated, we rejected representing our character in the way that would have been the social norm at that time. For example, waiting for the man to come to her. In our video, she 'goes after' him first and has the confidence to 'play hard to get'. 

We carried out independent and collaborative research on 50's adverts and record covers. The main images relating to women that kept occurring were: make up, new types of stockings and new kitchen appliances and inventions.  So, when exploring ideas for our digi pack and magazine advert, the idea of super-imposing our Caro onto an image of a 50's kitchen (connecting our Caro with an authentic original advert from the 1950's) came up. This was a good idea in terms of linking her to the era we had used for the video, however it also showed our strong, independent and often cheeky female character to be only identified by her sparkly, 50's, domestic, setting, like most women of that time. We wanted her strong character to be the thing that 'sold' the music instead of  imitating authentic adverts as a gimmick. 
(To give you an idea of the position of the 1950's housewife that we do NOT want to promote, the link below shows you the Rules for married women, compiled in a book called The Good Housewife's Guide!)

1955 good housewife's guide

The high speed chase was inspired by Benny Hill, a 1970'scomedian, who is famous for these sped up chases, and also for sexism in his shows. I believe that our version, even though it still shows the man chasing the woman, is not sexist because it is more innocent and light hearted and because our lady is wearing considerably more costume than the women in Benny Hill's chases! 

It was important to us to keep the make up and costume faithful to the era. We wanted to reject the clichéd dolly bird character of the 50's films but not deny her femininity. We did this by making detailed designs of her costume and make up and buying costumes as close as possible to the actual designs. Also, we used extreme close up shots of the character applying make up which placed more importance on these feminine actions. Make up was very important to women in the 1950's. There was an established 'look' that every woman aspired to, polished and un-ruffled. Perfection.  This 'look' was desired in every part of a middle class woman's life: her appearance, her house and especially her kitchen. We have used the 'perfect appearance' from this stereotype and rejected  the other two as they are synonymous with the housewife image which we did not want to represent. 

We wanted to carry this 'fun' image of women over to the digi pack and magazine advert to keep our representation consistent.  For example:

This is the image we used for the
magazine advert. The audience
can see she is having fun and not
taking herself too seriously. While
still looking polished and perfect!

This was a rejected image as the pose
 is static and no strong emotions show.
Almost doll-like.