Sunday, April 19, 2009

IVP3 - Eliza French

"Dress Up"

Inspiration: I chose to base my video project loosely on the idea of playing dress up. My most recent project focused on commodity culture, and with this project I expanded on that theme to examine the fashion industry, our obsession with celebrity, the portrayal of women in media, and our reaction to that image. All of the footage I used was found footage, mainly from fashion shows and a short experimental film. I also used still images of starlets like Lindsay Lohan, Lil' Kim, Mary-Kate Olsen, and Nicole Ritchie because they are known  for frequent and drastic changes in their overall appearance -including clothing style, weight, and hair color. I also considered feminist theorists I have read in my Literature/Vistual Studies class "Fashion and the Avant-Garde," including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, and Pamela Church Gibson.  In creating this video, I hoped the viewer would start to see that "dress up," instead of being a little girl's game of make-believe, is in fact a performative behavior we engage in every day to conform to standards or ideals circulating within our society.  
Method: I used a very straightforward website to download streaming videos from Youtube. I edited using iMovie. I mostly kept the found materials original audio because I liked the effect it added when it got sped up with the video.  For some clips, added audio clips from online and also from the iMovie library. I added visual effects like transitions between clips and the "flash" effect on the stills, and in many cases I sped up and/or reversed the footage. 
Found Video Material:
Retractable dress from  Hussein Chalayan's Spring 2007 collection
"Fantasia" video from SHOWstudio, a very unique and important project in the fashion industry, founded by Nick Knight
Cindy Sherman's "Doll Cothes" (1975), now in the Tate Collection
Marc Jacobs' S/S 2008 show, staged backward, inspired by surrealism and featuring the backward high-heels

No comments:

Post a Comment