Teen Vogue
I had originally chosen a different brief before being persuaded to do the teen vouge with Abbie. We began this project with firstly exploring the company and its previous campaigns and ads and other advs/campaigns alike.
We then studied and investigated the issues surrounding female sexuality, I looked into Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD), Nonmedical reasons, psychological reasons, Religion, female genital mutilation, Inexperience, education and body shame.
After this i investigated the anatomy of the vagina, how it works, changes during menstrual cycles and how it changes during sex. I think this was important as you cannot truly know your own body if you leave other people to explore it.
I looked at Yoni massage, female symbols, endorphins and erogenous zones on a female.
We explored consent, female sexual wellness, hygiene and health benefits of female masturbating: We researched advertisements, previous campaigns, music videos, films and protests. We looked at celebrities, quotes, famous sayings, female symbols and empowering feminists.
We soon realised that people are not educated enough about human anatomy and sexual function, if we talked and shared our experiences more, we could break the stigma and taboo surrounding female sexual pleasure.
We created mind maps and made a lists of household items that could potentially be used for self-pleasuring, sensual music, names people use instead of vagina and word plays.
We continued looking for inspiration and viewing old campaigns, protests and exhibitions from teen vouge themselves and other sites. We went on to look at quotes and saying surrounding female pleasure and viewed/compared items that resembled vaginas.
After this we looked at possible outcomes like a quiz, social media ads, written article, hash tags, forums, comparing males to females and small video adverts. We decided not to do the questionnaire or written article or the comparing sexes (didn’t want to included males in any way) and concentrate on the social media ads and the small 15-30 second video. We thought these ideas would work best for our target audience as young as age 14, they were lighthearted, with some slight humor, wasn’t shocking or too crass and was quite sensitive to the topic. and would be published through social media sites which this age group recognize more and are familiar with.
We wanted to do 4 ads/slides that included all the topics we had explored, Health, general sex, consent and self-pleasure. The idea was to include a quote, an image (which Abbie had created), statistics about each topic, forum link and the logo on each slide. It started off really well with some good ideas and sketches of diverse woman characters. However, they didn’t feel very real and needed more texture and due to lack of communication between us both we come to a standstill.
NEW APPROACH:
I then had to come up with a second outcome before deadline, I went back through my research and mind maps and decided on a 15-30 second ad which I thought was a great idea and more appealing for my target audience who use the internet, YouTube and apps more than other age groups.
I looked at names for my project, (settled on ‘please yourself’) and took inspiration from tv ads like the Marie curie advert which tried to encourage people to open up and talk about death, Kolex campaign about tampons and Libreese period ad. These types of ads were exactly what I wanted for this project for females to open up and talk about self-pleasure. I made a list of euphemisms for female self-pleasuring, searched for sexy, sensual music for my video and made a list of dialogue for my ad.
A video/animation advertisement was completely out of my comfort zone, I had never used any of the techniques, programs or software that I would need to create and produce a video.
I began with some sketches then transferred these to a story board and with the aid of Andrew who helped me photoshop my images and import them to animation software, I was able to create an animatic with my sketches before deadline but without the dialogue which I decided against.
The video was quirky and fun however, i didn’t have much time which was clear in the finished animatic, the images were not very clear, timing was not in sync with the music some euphemisms didn’t make sense and more care was needed with my visual work.
For my new animated video, I used actual people and actual film, I got to learn and use more techniques, software and a graphics tablet for the first time. I filmed 4- short videos and imported each one to premier pro and animate then using the graphic tablet and the rotoscoping technique I traced and animated each clip frame by frame to produce real actions but with a quirky style. Each one was saved then joined together with music in a full sequence video.
It was difficult and frustrating at some stages and I had to refer back to my notes to help me throughout, eventually it became fun, especially seeing the finished videos. I am really pleased with the final video and think the timing, sketches and euphemisms are much more clear and easier to understand.
Victoria Clegg 