Back to reality

So, it's been a while. The workshops pretty much finished just before Christmas so there was nothing really to write about, unless I wanted to make extra work for myself - but having a life prohibits me from doing so.
One of the first projects we had to do when we started the new term was to make a campaign video, inspired by those on battlefront.co.uk. I got into a group with the usual suspects - my darling Kate, Kelly and Amanda. After some thought we decided to make a video about "Real Beauty". How often have we seen the Barbie doll image of a woman in the media with fake breasts, fake nose, fake tan, fake everything? That's right - every day. So shouldn't people, particularly girls, learn to appreciate themselves and the way they look as they are? I think so (for the most part).
We decided to each capture a photo of our friends and ask them a question about what they would change about themselves. This varied from small things like their hair, to completely absurd things like their lips or chins. I mean, why would you want to change your lips? Really?
So, we edited these photos and responses into a video, with the backing track of the Sugababes single "Ugly". What followed those particular photos and responses was a series of rather unattractive photos of women whose plastic surgery operations clearly went terribly wrong. You know the kinds of people who look like balloons with wigs? Or have the facial features of a fish being pushed through a keyhole? Yeah, those kinda women.
The campaign was inspired by a similar one by Dove.
The last few seconds of footage was again of our friends, in their natural care-free element. Simply beautiful as they are.
We put this video together, or rather Kate did, because she is Wonder Woman when it comes to Windows Movie Maker and media projects, in a relatively short amount of time. Our next task was to show it to the class. There were lots of other interesting campaigns made by my fellow students. The one that stood out to me the most was a hilarious parody of chavs and teenage pregnancy. If only I knew where to find that on YouTube.
Anyway, here's what we came up with.
We know internet campaigns to be successful. We witnessed it at Christmas. If the public share an interest in something they will team up together to do something about it. The example I'm talking about is the Christmas number one. Tired of X-Factor winners being the annual top-spot-holder the public gathered together and joined a group on Facebook to get the lesser-known band 'Rage Against the Machine' to number one. I was skeptical at first as I'd seen these kinds of attempts before, but lo and behold it worked! Joe McElderry was number 2 for Christmas (in more ways than one) and Rage Against the Machine reigned champion. This was all down to the mass downloading of their single "Killing in the Name", a song first released in 1992.
Evidently if there's enough interest in something there's no telling what the public can achieve on their own terms.