Melanin (2018 - 2019)
"Melanin" focuses on colorism or shadeism: The basic idea is that prejudice expands from discrimination within a minority group stemming from the fact that skin tones vary.
Melanin acutely addresses this issue between mainly Blacks and more specifically Black women. I am going to proceed with this idea by conducting several interviews with black men and women ages ranging from 10yrs-80yrs.
Because this project was volunteer based and executed in a very short time frame, the full scope of this project is still developing. A special thanks goes out to a few women who did share their experiences, but because of a production process change, all were not featured.
Thanks to: Ogechi Elemuo, Maya Elbeck, and Paige Mitchell
Women In Refrigerators (2017)
The "Women in Refrigerators" video was born from a blog of the same name and attempts to make the similar points about how women are mistreated and used in media entertainment and in this instance specifically, comic books.
This project originally featured 100 people interviews individually, but unfortunately only these two videos have survived a data transfer that caused most of the interviews to be permanently deleted. Only these two cuts which were made for two distinctly different classes, featuring similar content with different goals survived. Apologies to all of the people who were interviewed and now suffer from lost footage (including me).
Pause (2020)
"Pause" is a PSA about microaggressions that is meant to parody the presentation of microaggressions is a pseudo-quasi testimonial style of exposure to the subjects with brief interludes of ethical passionate and logical information about the topic strewn in.
The action I am demonstrating is that a micro-aggressor is called into HR to discuss what was being said to the victim of the microaggression. The victims here reclaim the power that microaggressions cut away from them by putting the words in their mouths to recite in the same way they were targeted by the words phases actions and gestures. Meanwhile the HR lady played by my sister Darcey Rayner describes what microaggressions are, how they are used, where they come from, and how they affect the people targeted.
I was responsible for every part of this production as "Pause" was made during the COVID-19 pandemic. I had to take all safety precautions to meet and film my subjects throughout production with a very limited crew which could not participate in much of the production as we were all required to follow strict social distancing guidelines. No negative physical outcomes arose as a part of the process.