Author: Fiorella Pomarino Dextre

There is no way I will do this for a living

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Day/location/master/full frame/ camera does a zoom in, the characters don’t move they look at the camera very still.

FYI: It takes my 1 hour to make this, so it will take me 24 hours to complete all the film.

Two days in Aesthetica Short Film Festival – York.

This festival was my first experience. I have been to one or two films inside a festival but not like this. It was really nice. I like a lot of things and dislike a lot of things as well. The Masterclass I went to – Fashion Branding- was okay, but still I got some ideas that I liked.

– New production company (for me) : BLINK FISH https://www.theblinkfish.com/
– I did not know you could make an intership in NOWNESS
-Fashion films is a way to respond to culture
-Online to offline (installations/offline spaces)
-Instagram stories get more views
-Film: Creation of characters, chance to show personality and back story, present a message.
-Audio is very important
-Brand Identity to show better the message
-The power of a series instead of just one film, because the audience returns back always and it creates identity/style for the filmmaker/director
–Series format
-New talents: Reels, sent a couple of your lates films and a little text of the concept.

It was a great experience.

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Laura´s Project Collaboration

A month ago (I think) I booked a studio and try to shoot some photos of my self about my the movement of my own body (hands and feet). This time im collaborating with Laura doing the styling for her project. I like it because, I am into the whole body subject; how it moves, and how the garments can follow the movements or break them is what I like the most in this subject.

The Web of Identity | Notes

The scene needs to be set, the reasons given, the feelings described. The more diverse the audience, the longer the story, because the description needs to become more detailed. This length of description gets in the way of the argument – the very argument which relies on the description and which needs it. The question here is how much I have to include so that my readers will understand me. (P15)

I need them to explain their experience, knowledge and culture. (p15)

The conclusion for me was that the answer to the question about how long my stories should be depends on who the audience is, and how likely they are to recognise allusions to shared knowledge. (p16)

I have tried to think of memories which might not involve people and connections. I have found it impossible. I find connections with other people colour and frame every important building block in my remembered, imagined, conscious self. (p20)

Many other stories that the group of us doing maths and physics told ourselves about what kind of people we were, were stories about gender. (p21)

I wanted to belong to an abstract grouping: real women. (p22)

Sisterhood was powerful. Studies focusing on women and girls proliferated. However, the position has rapidly become increasingly complicated. Class, race, nationality and sexuality have combined to make feminist politics increasingly complex and ambiguous. The very possibility of taking any (let alone any one) feminist perspective has been brought into question. (p57)

To summarise this section: I have argued that there are four percepts for a critique of any epistemology, which, which arise from the commonalities in feminist epistemologies, and from my own analysis of dialogue with others. These percepts are as follows: (1) knowledge must be grounded in individual “experience”, “perspective”, “subjective”, or “position in a discourse”; (2) the factors of power and values cannot be added on afterwards, but are fundamental; (3) theorising is indispensable; and (4) there is no possibility of the acquisition or creation of stable, … (p61)

It is possible that the child´s developing sexuality, its personality, or artistic or mathematical abilities are inherited rather than social constructed. (p65)

The second percept was that “power-relations” cannot be added on afterwards, but are fundamentals. The analysis of language has shown some of the ways in which power-relations enter into subjectivity, adn the description of experience. The argument of chapter 3 showed some of the complexities of dialogue in situations of inequality and injustice. Thus in re-thinking that experience we have to take account of power and politics affect our language, how we are positioned in it and how it is used about us, and the effect of large-scale inequalities on communication. (p67)

First, there is the problem with finding (or creating) oneself: often expressed as finding a real self acceptable to itself. Second, there is the problem with making the subjective experience as a problem of dealing with the experience of fragmented and changing self. I take each one of these two concerns in turn, finally pointing out that underpinning both of them are similar issues. (76)

I begin with the problem of finding oneself. The experience of sex discrimination may be the experience of oppressive material structures. The violent husband, the difficulty of finding child-care, biased immigration laws and regulations: these are all examples which quickly spring to mind. Such conditions may appear to have a little to do with finding oneself. However, alongside such material structures – and interacting with them – are habits of mind, in both men and women, which help keep the structures in place. In a woman they may be lack of self-confidence, a de-valuing of her own needs and desires. These habits of mind can be just as oppresive as the material structures which are so much easier to identify. (76)

The opposing (liberal) idea that the self is not gendered claims that the core is individuated by its particular needs and desires, but that these needs and desires are much the same for both sexes. There is no need for identity politics here, because there is no male or female, only persons – so as soons as the playing field is leveled, everyone can go ahead an realise their own ambitions, meet their own needs and have perfect freedom to become unequal individuals. (77)

The process

The construction of the self-persona in contemporary women in their 20s, through the relationship with their clothing

Why?

The first couple of weeks that I was here, in London, I had a Panic Attack and was the worst experience ever in my life. This is the second time I had experience it. The next day in class I was feeling horrible and someone noticed. That person came into me, and said that I was looking very tired. We started talking and finally I told her. At the end, she told me she had experienced them too and we talked about it. I felt good. Next week after that episode I was talking to another person from class and she openly talked to me about it. She had a panic attack. We are not used to talk about things like this but for some reason between us we did. We have this feeling that sharing this type of things are wrong or are very private.

I want to explore what mental health issues, persons can have around me, and how this reflects into their self-personas. This is a huge part of our personality and identity, and it is part of our process to create our self-persona in fashion. Fashion is a medium of expression. We express ourselves by showing it through clothes. I want to show this through two things:

1. Set design: I will make 1 set for each person with meaningful things, experiences or problems from their past. I am trying to create a beautiful, but real, collage of their past.
2. Styling: I will use a styling through garments that can show part of their self-persona. What they have become now.

I am working in some questions around this, so I can create from that brief the representation and interpretation of their past and present.

I am also trying to put a camera effects like jaws when the character is in its last position so you could see how present and past merge.  

I will update it more!

F.

I read the Fashion Film Book, it was a great way to enter to this genre of film. There are several points of views about fashion films but for me its about clothing, fashion discourse and narrative, what makes a good fashion film.

• From Hollywood stars to below-the-radar promos, from industry documentaries to big-brand entertainment, the fashion film is a slippery signifier, used to denote different types of filmmaking in different contexts. The paradox of fashion film is precisely the absence of any consensus as to its actual contours. By interweaving short-form commercial film with narrative feature film, I argue that the standard definition of fashion film as a discrete textual form of moving image that evolved as minor form of filmmaking through the twentieth century to display fashionable clothing has been challenged by the expansion of digital media convergence and the increasing importance of fashion brands of an online social media video content that is both immersive and interactive. (Pg4)

• Superseding an analog understanding in which the presentational display of the garment was the focal point, a contemporary digital reconceptualization of fashion film in its multiple guises—as both media image and cultural representation—must account for the popular discourses of the global entertainment industry along with the branded communications of the luxury-designer industry. (Pg4)

• Hilary Radner, for her part, distinguishes between films about the industry, such as Altaman´s, from a more localized understanding of the fashion film in twenty-first-century screen culture as one which transcends product placement to embed narrative within an elaborate consumer environment, which is staged to promote fashion. “The film´s function”, she argues, “as a shop window is not secondary at its story. (pg7)

• …fashion film has now slipped from the fashion industry into popular culture more broadly, and is now more simple understood by a mainstream audience to refer to fiction and nonfiction feature films with fashion as the topic rather than as the vehicle. (Pg7)

• Like fashion, the beauty of the clip is fleeting and ephemeral; it draws on the fragmented memories created by the rapid montage of shots. Daney wrote clinically of the music video as a sort of biopsy taken from a larger body of cinematic work—a sample that concentrates feeling and emotion through a short, sharp burst of energy. (Pg35)

• (…) fashion joins the mixing-board culture of music video in shaping today´s “intensified audiovisual aesthetics”, in which the boundaries and distinctions between online platforms, forms, and technologies are increasingly blurred. (Pg35)

• Elsewhere, however, branded collaborations on creative projects with film directors have tended more often to rely on the dramatic effects of storytelling, a fact that underlines two intersecting trends in cinema and fashion branding; first, the return of narrative dramatization to high-end fashion imagery; and the second, the impact of branded entertainment on the conception, direction, and style of the contemporary features films

Notes

P7: At heart, fashion is all about the art of self-adornment: the visual presentation of ourselves to the external world. What we choose to wear reflects how we view the world and how we want the world to view us. (…) they are all tied to our very human need to express individuality.

P14: (…) the intrinsic role that clothes play in the creation of character and the telling of a story that is both believable and meaningful.

P90-91: You are what you wear. Recently a colleague of mine at the London College of Fashion asked a group of staff to undertake a deconstruction an reading of the clothes he was wearing. He then challenged us to share our conclusions about his background, education, leisure interests, food preferences and cultural choices; really anything we thought we could decode from his her, accessories, clothes, shoes and coat. My colleague undertakes this same exercise with new students each year in order to get them thinking about the many ways we decode and read people we meet on a day-to-day basis and how we balance our lived experiences with the stereotypes pushed through films, TV shows, newspapers and magazines. (…) It made me think how carefully I choose my clothes, accessories, hairstyle and even make-up because I think that together they say something to the world about me, about who I am. In a way, we use our clothes as a proxy for language, and as with all communication our appearance can be misunderstood. We can misread others and in our globalized world the opportunity for miscommunication are becoming even greater.

P98: Our fashion footprint. (..) the clothes we wear, we are constantly developing our own social, cultural and political ideas and ideals. Your cultural footprint is the sum total of your cultural input and output. It expresses who you are in very real terms. Your cultural footprint is most easy to visualize in the context of the internet. (..) Globaly, we seem to have so much and yet we are in danger of losing our national and cultural identities as well as our own personal style and individuality. We are being encouraged to accept one culturally acceptable look. Will we forget that our cultural engagement with clothes is also part of who we are?

The construction of the self persona in contemporary women

So, I really want to keep going, but I wanted to doble check if its everything going in the right way.

I wanted to use the panel led lights. Im not a photographer but I have some notion about it. So I tried to create this series about my own body, about my hands and feet. I wanted to use a lot of black and try to break down our body and transform it into something else. Its not perfectly lighted, but I love it.

Self Portraits

So, finally I know what Im going to do for my final project for this unit! Im so fucking happy. It just came to me yesterday and I worked on it all day (just the brainstorming and writing ideas). So I was thinking about my final project and how this could be a path to it.
In my study proposal I wrote this:

“My professional style is the nonlinear narrative. It helps me tell many stories that I do not want to say literally. Finding the space to generate subtexts is the ideal way to express a story without explicitly telling it. Semiotics are also very helpful in the storytelling process, not only in the narrative but also in the creation of characters. We can generate different semiotic signs that complement the construction of the character through fashion. A fashion film should always have a particular aesthetic. This is how I want my fashion films to be identified.

Earlier this year, I brainstormed a number of concepts about interpersonal relationships; this input served as a catalyst for me to create a series of short films about dysfunctional relationships in a mundane world but with a particular aesthetic. “If you throw even a cursory glance into the past, (…) you are struck every time by the singularity of the events in which you took part, (..) This singularity is like the dominant note of every moment of existence;(..) The artist therefore tries to grasp that principal and make it incarnate, (…) to his personal vision” (Tarkovsky, p.104).

So, I thought of something that I started to research when we made our objects stories. Identity. How Identity can define us in so many different ways. It is not only about our cultural backgrounds, but how our past childhood define us. In my study proposal I talked about interpersonal relationships, and also dysfunctional relationships. So I thought of making for my Master a Fashion Film Series, and I thought first of talking about our own relationship. I wrote some ideas in the left of the first picture. “Naturalism, body, character, singing, identity, love, respect, what they care about?, all in their clothes, beauty, favorite day of your life”. I tried to picture it on my mind and thought about two main frames to tell this story. A close frame and a frame that I could re create a space for a standing person. Every person has its own past (built by so many different things); that would be the set. For the present I thought about the styling, so both things (set and styling) will have a narrative, besides the narrative of the film. How we create our selfs and how we could be so different, but at the same time the same.

In the last page I wrote persons from around the world that could help me doing this. I thought taking them from the private space to a public one. Asking questions about their childhood, their culture, how the felt, something that was special to them, something that they didnt like, and more. So with this info I can create a space that could represent them, and mixed it with a styling. I think thats how you create your own persona.
I thought of reaching for help so:
1. Laura (she will be taking photos for every space that I create)
2. Jack (i will like him as the DP)
3. Anna (i will like her to be my producer)
4. Rodrigo (a friend of mine he could be my assistance)
5. Fiorella (directing and set designer)

Also the personas I though of are:
1. Olivia
2. Paola
3. Jessi
4. Firda
5. ?