Digital Video

HOW DO MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY SHAPE OUR PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY?

When considering the question at hand, I thought about the influences that would also be seen by our students, and today more than ever, social media is taking over. There are many trends that adolescents and adults alike are exposed too, and they seem to changing on a regular basis. However, these trends always seem to influence girls more than they do boys. I chose this to be the focus of my video.

To illustrate, I chose three topics that have gained recent popularity in terms of female image. They included thigh gaps, the perfect derrière and of course eyebrows. These ideas of the perfect body are then juxtaposed with a recent surface of male image, the "dad bod." In my video, I explore these trends via a social media, specifically Instagram, and then show how one might go about achieving them. Of course, as a male, these standards don't necessarily apply to me, as the very masculine voice comments through the bathroom door. To conform to societies standards, and to show how much easier it is to be a male, I default to eating and drinking on my sofa.

To show the use of social media, a perspective angle of over my shoulder was used to immerse the viewer and allow them to see what I was seeing as if they were experiencing it as well. Quick transitions were used to show the immediate response to these online trends. Finally, music was layered over each type of scene to give them unity between each other, and to show the difference between looking at the trends and executing them.

I chose stock audio in iMovie for my video, using "Catwalk" for when browsing social media to illustrate the relation to image and fashion, and "Breakbeat" for the action shots as it reflected the mood of them.

All video was shot using and iPhone, and then edited via iMovie before being uploaded to YouTube. Please enjoy my video below.