Feminist views on Blurred Lines Music Video

Feminists definitely recognize that music videos are a source of women being sexually exploited and it has become increasingly popular and common within hip hop and pop music videos. A clear example of this would be ‘Blurred Lines’ Robin Thicke music video. The models in this video wear revealing clothing and they act in a sexual manner, they also have an explicit version of their video, which depicts these women topless, clearly revealing their breasts. Some feminist’s see this video in a negative way, they say that it is just portraying women as objects to be looked at and that the men in the video dominate the women. However the Director of the music video (Diane Martel) which defends her video and she stated that the women were in control, calling it  ‘Sex positive feminism’. The way she backed this up was by stating "Blurred Lines played with the "male gaze" while being entertaining. The naked, sexy women are dominant, the men are submissive.” She mention’s the male gaze, which was a theory that Laura Mulvey.

Blurred Lines Media project

This is our Blurred Lines music video replica. The reason we chose to replicate this video is because we felt that it was a simple and popular video that we could replicate effectively with the resources we have. We had 3 good actors as well that played the part of the characters in the video perfectly.

Evaluation

Replicating a music video such as 'Blurred Lines' was not easy and it required good organisation to get the whole cast together for filming and to get all of the scenery set up. Replicating a music video was a good chance to get experience for making our own music video. I also got us familiar with the kind of shots which are common in music videos and we also got the chance to see what we should do on our music video and what we shouldn't. For example, we have decided not to have people outside our group act in our video because they will not be as committed and they may be a liability to our group. On the other hand I feel that we should continue playing the music in the background as the actors perform so that they can lip sync accurately. It has certainly prepared us nicely for our main task.

The replication process of this video did not go smoothly at all because of the lack of organisation and the abundance of actors available when filming. It was very difficult to have the whole cast together when filming because of the lack of free time available. Due to this problem we had to replace certain shots with fillers and replace certain actors which then resulted in the video not looking like a very successful replica. However I do believe that the acting was all round great and the lip syncing and editing was perfect however some of the shots and the scenery did not match the video which was disappointing.

The changes I would make would definitely be the organisation because we found it difficult to find a time where everyone was available and we couldn't find a location where we could continuously keep filming in. This caused problems because we had to keep changing location. The lighting was also a aspect which needed better controlling because of the changes of location, certain locations had better lighting than others which caused a continuity error  The filming could have also been improved because some of the shots are not accurately similar to the actual music video and other shots were just poorly filmed and out of focus. When we film our own music video, I will personally ensure that all the shots are well filmed. From the feedback we received we realised that the costumes in some of the shots do not accurately relate to the actual music video, to be specific Mustafa changes costumes numerous times throughout the video. Continuity errors is something that we have to actively avoid in our future music video because it could take people away from the experience.

Blurred Lines Props

We've created one of the props for our video which was the dice but we haven't created a Haystack or a  dice and goat but can we decided to use other props to imitate the props mentioned.

The equipment we used include a Tripod, a EOS 550D Canon camera and stage lighting also a laptop so the actors can go along with the video itself.

We also got access to white sheets to put in the background courtesy of one of our group members and D.T teachers who provided us with fabric to put up against the wall.