Mulvey Film Evaluation

Overview 

For this unit we created a short film based upon Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze; in this theory, Mulvey theorised that when viewing a text , the audience is described as viewing as if they were a heterosexual man, and therefore from their point of view they view women as objects and sexualise them. AJ - my partner in this assessment, and I, decided to implement this into a film which reveals how the male gaze is applicable in both media and real life. This was achieved with a narrative that depicted a real-life situation, a girl working out in a gym that is majorly dominated by men. The idea we had initially was to display how both men and women do the same routines and exercises in the gym, but ultimately women are seen as objects for visual pleasure. Our narrative loosely resembles a workout video, we see the protagonist (AJ) doing numerous different exercises with the help of a personal trainer (Kieran), however through techniques of fragmentation we were able to sexualise an everyday activity. AJ took on the role of editing, and I elected to shoot the film, with the help of Kieran for some shots which required me. I believe we captured the male gaze theme effectively, through the use of fragmentation and cut-in shots we were able to focus on parts of the body which would serve as visual pleasure for the audience; we also used the hand-held camera technique and a variety of point-of-view shots in order to highlight that this objectification was a result of a man's point of view. 

Improvements

First of all, we were filming in a public location, therefore we had to be aware of people that maybe didn't want to be in the background of our video. This affected our filming as we had to alter the position of some shots to make sure that certain people were not in the footage, meaning that we were not able to get some of the shots we desired. However, we accounted for this by reshooting some clips on different days or using a different shot altogether instead. Regarding the lighting - the light levels in the gym remained the same throughout our filming, though some shots had the windows in frame, in which the sky looked overexposed; we couldn't do much about this problem as we had to keep the camera settings similar in order to maintain the same quality of picture throughout the film.