Ideas - Laura

• Yesterday we started to discuss ideas for our short film. We have found with our research that a lot of short films use the genre of social realism as they convey messages, often to do with issues surrounding our society. Our initial idea was to of a film on domestic violence. It seems to be an issue that is around in society, but there is never much coverage on it. The White Ribbon campaign is a campaign working against women being treated with violence. We are fast approaching White Ribbon day: 25th November. This campaign will give us a lot of information about domestic violence, so that we can help display the severity of it in our film if this is what we end up doing.

• However, as we are looking at issues of femininity and masculinity also in this media course, we are going to try and interpret the film with this ideology in mind. The White Ribbon campaign "pledges never to commit, condone or remain silent about violence against women". However this campaign seems to only talk about females who are domestically abused as opposed to the men. Though cases of men being abused are not as common, they are still present.

• In my research I found this picture (below) supporting this campaign. We thought the picture was really emotive, as it has an extreme close up of a woman's eyes. This conveys the emotion clearly, and we can see how scared she looks to reinforce how serious domestic violence is. The shot allows us to just see the top of a hand covering the woman's mouth in the frame. They have shown enough of the hand in the frame for us to see the features that it is a man's hand, conforming to the stereotype that a man is physically stronger, and the traditional representation of men having power because of patriarchy. This picture has sparked the beginning of our ideas for the Film Poster that we will need to produce.  
• Looking at statistics it has been shown that over 40% of domestic violence cases, men are the victims, yet these cases are much more ignored by the media and police then female cases.

•  In our film, it is practical for us to be the actors so that we do not have to rely on people when we are trying to fit filming around our own schedules. As we are teenagers, we were thinking of focusing on domestic abuse among teenagers so that way we could act. These cases are often to do with sex; where the male is pressuring her, as we have found in some of the adverts we researched.