My intention was to create a glamorous and overly aestheticised metaphor for the male gaze—a sort of parody of the cinematic femme fatale archetype. Female identity is often reduced to physical appearance; I represented this concept within my own work through the emphasis of mirrors and a focus on the female protagonist’s physical attributes, particularly her eyes, lips and body. I aimed to place the audience from the perspective of the male gaze, using shots where my subject’s face was cut out of the frame, resolutely focusing on her body. The lack of any dialogue also reiterates the focus on her physical attributes rather than her voice. I wanted to replicate this harmful way of portraying female identity and then subvert it, with the end of my film acting as a direct criticism of the male gaze.
After the week on ‘Light and Shadow’ I knew that I wanted to experiment with lighting in my final project. I used exaggerated lighting and colour to emphasise the pantomime. As I knew that I’m not confident in colour grading, I decided to manipulate the colours physically—using coloured gels and an LED. I decided that a warm tone lighting made the domestic space feel vibrant and theatrically elevated.
I had a lot of fun experimenting with diegetic sound in my film. To underscore the piece, I wanted a piece of music that was effective in aiding the sultry, playful essence of date-night flirtation—deciding on a jazz/soul piece. I was surprised to learn how music acted as an influence for my editing; each straight cut is timed with the beat of the song. This provided a structure and resulted in felicitous transitions.
The Week 7 homework task acted as a model for my final project—using a female subject for the portrait, and the same conceptual idea of her getting ready for a romantic encounter. Most of the make-up application shots are rooted in this initial portrait of Elki, sharing both composition and framing. This afforded me the opportunity to be more confident in my decisiveness when directing some of the final film’s shot ideas. I also learnt a valuable lesson during this homework task: to shoot more footage than I thought I would need.
During the process of filming and editing this project I’ve realised that whilst I might have a clear vision of what I want something to look like in my head, it can be hard to translate it exactly on screen… Some of the shots I had imagined had to be reconfigured as I gauged the spatial potential of the location. Some of my film’s shot composition was influenced by particular stills from movies such as ‘Swallow’ (dir. Carlo Mirabella-Davis, 2019) and ‘Last Night in Soho’ (dir. Edgar Wright, 2021). In the former I was drawn to the frame within a frame shot and the contrast between red and green light. In the latter I was intrigued by the heavy use of mirrors. I attempted to incorporate different stylistic elements from these movies.
Additionally, I didn’t have as much technical control as I would have liked. I didn’t feel particularly confident with the camera functions and as a result, I shot a lot of the footage in automatic mode. Hopefully, as I get more comfortable with the camera functions and the editing software, I will be able to take some more technical creative risks. For future projects, I’d be really interested in learning how to properly colour grade as experimenting with colour and light was one of my favourite parts of this project.