After developing my initial idea of how women are using society's obsession with image to change attitudes towards gender stereotypes through their obsession with skateboarding or motorcycles, I took this research to my group. Between us we decided to focus on female skateboarders, just because it is something we had not thought of before even though we are all young women ourselves.
Therefore, we conducted some research together, looking for female skateboarders we could feature and experts we could interview.
Be Real & This Girl Can:
I had originally found the Be Real campaign from my own research, but we also remembered hearing about the This Girl Can campaign from their adverts and thought someone from the campaign could act as an expert in our documentary because of how they empower women to get involved in sports such as archery, fencing, and roller derby. This is important since some women can be afraid of judgement, which affects skateboarding since many female skateboarders are often the only woman in the skatepark.
So far, we have contacted both organisations and are awaiting replies.
Girls Skate UK:
We also think we could use some of the ambassadors and coaches from these groups as experts since they may be women who participate in the sport themselves, and have also seen firsthand how skateboarding can help women.
We have contacted both the Nefarious Skate Crew and the Longboard Girls Crew UK, and have planned to meet with a member of the Nefarious Skate Crew, Kayleigh Hurst, as well as are planning to meet with some of the members and ambassadors of the Longboard Girls Crews in Brighton and London.
"Gnarly in Pink": The Girl Skateboarding Posse:
I also came across a short opinion documentary on three six year old little girls who have their own skate crew they call 'The Pink Helmet Posse'.
This film used a lot of actuality sequences to introduce the girls and show their lives, such as them painting their nails with sparkles at the beginning whilst at the skatepark. This set up the film using viewers' expectations of how they typically thought of little girls, but foreshadowed that these expectations would be later changed by having the setting be the skatepark. The skatepark is later used to unravel these expectations as one of the girls is seen falling, but still getting back up and doing the trick again, this time successfully. Many examples of sequences like this were able to show that these girls are still like other six year girls, but enjoy skateboarding.
Captions are also used to show statistics about women in sport and how little there are, meaning that overall this film highlights the dangers and threats women who skateboard face, but also the need for women who skateboard, and are in other sports which are seen as masculine, to become more widespread and accepted since it can give them confidence through empowerment and enjoyment.
For our film, it allowed me to see the importance of featuring our female skateboarder's friends and family to enable her whole story to be told, and also to show her journey.
It also showed me how it is possible to direct a skateboarding sequence, as the director of this film frequently films the girls skateboarding by having the camera on a tripod on top of the skate ramp so it is possible to capture them doing tricks.
However, it also made me think that it could be as effective, if not more so, to have the camera be positioned on the ground a little way away from the skateboarder so that the audience would be placed in the position of looking up at her, giving her power and making the trick seem as dangerous and impressive as it is, since it could highlight the height needed to be reached to achieve some of these tricks.
BBC London News Report:
This video report from BBC London was on Facebook, and I found it through the Longboard Girls Crew as one of their members is featured.
Since this is a news report and is quite short, it features only two interviews, one with the female long boarder featured, and one with a coach from the crew, as well as some actuality explaining the different disciplines involved in long-boarding.
The main message this report aims to get across is that it is possible to be a woman and take part in long-boarding because other women do, and enjoy it because it empowers them.
With regards to our film, this report made me think about attaching a camera to a skateboard, such as a GoPro, and showed that this could be possible by attaching to the bottom of the board away from the wheels. However, I think it could also be possible to attach the camera to the top of the board at the front, although I need to do some experiments to test both these methods and see if they work, which I could do by using an old skateboard I have, and my dad's GoPro.
Sky Brown: 9 year old skater girl:
Link to the video on YouTube: watch
I also found this short film on YouTube about Sky Brown, a nine year old skater girl from Japan. The film follows her as she visits Venice Beach in America, and talks about how much she loves skateboarding, surfing, and enjoys conquering her fears as she loves a challenge.
The film is only just over five minutes long but it was useful to watch because as we have two contributors for our documentary this is about the same amount of time we will spend covering skateboarding. There is one interview with Sky, and one with the president of the largest skateboard company in America, who has met Sky and her brother. There were a lot of sequences which gave the documentary a much more personal feel as it leads the viewer into Sky's world, and shows her own perspective on skateboarding.
Overall, I think that this film made me think about our documentary in the sense that we could use a lot of sequences mixed with interviews like this to give it a more personal feel. I think this could work as we don't technically have an expert, but the skateboarder we feature will be an expert on her own obsession, and the views of her friends and other skateboarders who skate at the same park as she does can help to expand this.
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