Sex Shop- Idea 1

DOCUMENTARY UNIT

Imagining Reality: 'People and Place'

Group: Kaitlan, Claudia, Ndumiso, Leah and Ellie (Group C)

Our Brief:

The finished film will be of no more than 10 minutes duration. Explore the theme of 'People and Place' through producing a documentary/fact based film. You should convey meaning through cinematic language and use non-digetic sound imaginatively (a noise that does not have a source on screen and has instead been added in). You need to challenge the conventional documentary form. 

INTERVIEWS USED ONLY FOR AUDIO TRACKS.

How do you define a documentary?

We were asked this question in class and these are some of the answers we came up with:

- An insight into reality.

-Seeing things from a different perspective.

-Exposing people to things they don't necessarily want to see/expect to see.

-Educate your audience.

-Breaking stereotypes.

- Based on official documents.

-Informative.

- Objectivity.

IDEA 1

Living in Aldershot, I have come across my fair share of odd shops but one stood out the most. 'The Private Shop' located at the far end of Manor Park always intrigued me because of it's very secretive look. The shop is all blue, with covered windows and a blocked out door. This is simply because of the nature of the content it holds inside it. This shop is a Sex shop and, as pornographic content can only be shown to the ages of 18+, the shop makes sure not to put on a public display so to only invite in the older audiences who actually know what a 'Private Shop' is. The shop is covered in an array of sex toys, adult movies and very poorly cared for, outdated decor. It's also Rushmoor's only sex shop. A shop like this holds a story and the people owning it clearly hold a story just as interesting, if not more- the ideal topic for a documentary. Sex as a topic is also just not talked about enough and can be seen as a taboo subject. People are ashamed and embarrassed to walk in and out of a sex shop but I don't think that should be the case, at least not until people find out more about it. 

                                Aldershot's 'Private Shop'

When being asked to brainstorm ideas for our documentary, the idea to focus on a Sex Shop came into the mix. We thought that it would not only be effectively provocative but that it would also just be genuinely interesting to look into, as it's such a secretive practice. Also, having a Sex shop easily accessible to us and having been in their once before made the logistics of filming much more plausible. We shared our main idea to the class and the response was really positive. People were really excited at the fact that we wanted to focus on something so raunchy. Also, Anne mentioned that she had done a lot of documentaries around the subject of sex so that instantly gave us the confidence that we could look to her for help and inspiration if needed. She showed us one of her documentaries on rubber fetishes, a subject that is rarely talked about. The Documentary was called 'The Skin2 Rubber Ball'. Fetishes are such a big phenomenon but some people are more reserved about sharing such fetishes so we don't really hear to much about it. In this documentary, the camera crew became part of an exclusive fetish party. It was a room filled with people each sharing the same interest as each other without any judgement whatsoever and instead the attention of a film crew. It was quite a shock watching it at first as people were walking around with 'slaves' on leashes in skin tight latex. Usually commercially censored parts of the body were fully on show and people were appreciating that it any way they could. People were dancing with each other and the camera was showing so many different kinds of people with this same fetish. One man that was focused on was covered head to toe in red latex as people truly do find this as being the ultimate sensory experience. Some were more over-dressed than others but that didn't mean they were any less involved. The documentary begins with a couple of people being turned away from the venue for being 'under dressed'. I found the whole documentary so interesting as we were let into a world otherwise completely unknown to you unless you have this particular fetish. 

This documentary definitely helped our group get inspired. Some members of the class said that it made them feel quite uncomfortable but that's exactly the reason as to why a documentary on sex is so important. It takes people out of their comfort zone and shows them something completely different. The more publicity their is on subjects like sex, the more normal it will become to talk about it openly.

We also mentioned our alternative idea to the class if, for some reason, the Sex Shop didn't work out. Our idea was to do a documentary surrounding Synaesthesia, as one of our group members Leah has a type of synaesthesia so we already had a strong lead for interrogation. We got an equally positive response however, a lot of people didn't actually know completely what Synaesthesia is. Once we explained it, people got a lot more excited. The fact that not many people know about it also drove us to really consider this as an option for our documentary. This is because, so many people are making documentaries on the same kind of thing. They are meant to be educational and teach you something new yet they are all falling under the same categories. Seeing this response from the class definitely put this idea up to the same level as the Sex shop.

Definition:

Synaesthesia is a condition in which someone experiences things through their senses in an unusual way, for example, by experiencing a sound as a colour or a number as a position in space.

When having a tutorial with Anne she suggested that we keep Synaesthesia strongly in our minds as a back up for if Sex shop doesn't work. We decided to split the roles up within the group a little and have different people research into Sex Shop and Synaestheisa. We then went on to create a google docs on which we'd share all our research with each other.

(link below)

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SpgpG9qC9evWspZ039ALVez9uc86D3NFshP1_KUirh8/edit?ts=5dcae299

Initial ideas for Synaesthesia after tutorial with Anne:

- Instagram Poll asking people about their synaesthesia. 

- Explore their Point of View.

-Play around with sound effects in animation.

-Cover more than one sense as some people can taste the colour green.

-How would it link to place as the brief is people and place?

We thought that if we put up an Instagram poll or a post on Farnham Freshers about this condition, that we'd hopefully we'd get a big response from Synaesthesia due to being in a creative school surrounded by creative, quirky minds.

Initial ideas for Sex Shop after tutorial with Anne:

-Go for passion!

-Why are you running a Sex Shop?

-Intyeresting to see what goes on behind the scenes.

-See how different customers act in a Sex Shop- are they open or ashamed?

(think about permissions for this)

-Male orientated? Feminism

-Associate sex shop with creeps.

-Great if you could find a female run sex shop.

-Could run into trouble filming customers

-Ask owner to introduce us to regulars

-Internet compared to high street

-Whether they enjoy their job

We also had another idea inspired by 'Humans of New York'. It could be called 'Humans of Aldershot' and focus around stories of the people of this quirky little town with quite a bit of history. However, the response to this idea wasn't as great. One, because it was rather a filler of an idea and it wasn't very well thought through. 

It needed a specific focus and needed to be based around one question to find this focus. You could easily get lost in the edit. It needed a form of continuity and consistency. The one positive thing that came from this idea was that the style of it could be applied to our other stronger ideas. 

You can immediately see that we had a lot more initial ideas for the Sex shop, however, we still kept Synaesthesia very much with us. 

Possible questions for sex shop:

- Why are you running the Sex Shop?

- How did you get into the Industry?

-Would there be customers up for a chat?

-Do porn sites affect business?

-Would you be willing to be in our documentary?

-Part time? Full time?

- Does this job affect your romantic life?

- Target audience?

-What got you into the business?

-Are customers willing to be filmed?

-Are you comfortable answering some personal questions?

Research for inspiration as we were stuck on what to lead with:

i-D presents 1:21 'What Is Beauty'

Looking more into the sex shop idea, we began to feel like focusing on the one in Aldershot would be a bit of a dry subject matter as the shop isn't particularly up and coming, it's rather dreary inside and is run by an older man. It would be good to find a trendy sex shop that needs more publicity. 

'What is Beauty' is an explicit, beautiful video found on VICE. It's raw and sensual and makes you slightly uncomfortable which is what we wanted to try and achieve. I remember feeling instantly excited by the prospect of creating something similar to this video.This gave us ideas for how we could possibly open the documentary but then we didn't want to already just be focusing on the opening. We needed a solid direction so stopped thinking about the sex shop as a subject but instead opened up the idea of focusing on sex as a whole.

The description for this video just made it that little bit better: 'Watch wide-eyed as boobs, pubes, nips and drips take over in this honest portrayal of intimacy'. I feel like this was a perfect description for what you were about to watch.

It's unusual compositions of the body which i love. The video consists of a montage of different parts of the body being shown and used intimately in varied ways. Some parts do make you feel uncomfortable, like the close-up passionate kissing at the beginning. However, you can't help but watch because what you're seeing is natural and beautiful, you're just seeing it in an imaginative, original way. 

Kaitlan and I immediately got to drawing up a little storyboard of ideas for shots we could use for a quirky montage. We realised that a lot of the images we were coming up with were too similar to what we had just seen, we just loved the video too much. So, we began to think a little out the box and try and craft it to fit more to the brief. 

We were thinking that we could conduct the shoot in a studio to control the lighting and play around with filters and gels. We came up with a few transitions:

-Flashes in Pink and Blue (alter in edit)

- Reverse sequences

-Slow motion

-Cut footage and return

-Thin line between fetishes and sex toys, we want to make a clear distinction.

This gave us more hope that we could further develop our Sex shop idea. Even still, we put up a post on the Freshers page asking people about Synaesthesia to see what sort of response we got as the only other fault with our Sex shop, now 'Sex', idea is that we couldn't actually find a subject. I had messaged a friend of a friend called Ted (Instagram name- 'artpornblog') as he is a very prominent queer figure in the Kent area and has a lot of pornographic content on his Instagram. He replied with eagerness for our idea but said that he had a very busy schedule and the only way we could interview him would be over face time. So despite his kind efforts, we didn't really have a lead with this. We kept our minds open however.

After another tutorial with Anne we began to think about things like whether there's a fetish scene in Aldershot and if there was, how we'd go about finding out?
We also covered the topic of safe sex and the male gaze- if the male gaze is redeemable. All of these could be possible leading points for our film however, none of them were particularly grabbing our attention. Anne told us to look at Marie Claire and search for articles. We also raised the question that i mentioned before, are sex shops out of date? Are we documenting a business that no one really cares for anymore? But then we thought about how we could incorporate the past compared to now and what kind of people still use sex shops. Are their specialist sex shops we could look at? Safe sex parties? We did look into 'Sh!Women's erotic emporium' after this tutorial and sent them an email, however we never heard back. And the logistics of getting up to London with all of our equipment and little time weren't ideal.

We decided it was time to start thinking more about Synaesthesia as we had no strong lead for the sex shop and we were wasting valuable time trying to find one.