Archive of Our Own

Password = freak

Download: MP4 (249.76 MB), MP4 HD (612.09 MB), WMV (126.94 MB), WMV HD (168.9 MB), Subtitle file (SRT)
Streaming: Vimeo (Password = freak)

I honestly thought I was finished making vids for Festivids when I completed The Laughing Heart. How could I possibly top that? I couldn't, obviously. But then I was looking through the fandoms, wondering which vid was for me, and realised no-one had vidded Barbie.

No Barbie!!!

I couldn't do anything about the Oscars, but I figured I could at least make a vid. Several other people had the same realisation in that final week, because a handful of Barbie vids were posted in the last few days before go-live, which made me very happy.

Anyway, when I started making this, I wanted to make something that focused on Barbie's journey to real-personhood, and in particular, womanhood. I didn't plan to really include Ken much at all.

As I was waiting for the cleaned visuals to render, I quickly reviewed a bunch of songs, looking for something that would work. It needed to be able to work as a female perspective or female-focused through line, and I wanted it to be either from the 60s or 70s or retro inspired. I must have sampled eighty or a hundred songs, perhaps more, but in the end I shortlisted two: Flower by Kylie Minogue, and Helen Reddy's I Am Woman. You might have noticed that neither of those are the song I ended up using - I find that happens to me a lot.

I got as far as starting the project and importing Reddy's I Am Woman. But it just didn't sit right. I knew in my bones it wasn't the song I needed. So I did a final frantic search, and stumbled across Chic's Le Freak, which was an old favourite I'd never thought about vidding before. My gut said, "yes", so I immediately imported it.

Then I stared at my timeline, asking myself, "What the hell am I doing?" I had no idea what I was going to vid, I just had an instinct that this song would get me where I wanted to go, and that the focus would be Barbie's journey.

In the last year, I've been working on a project to make a lot of fast-paced vids to exercise to. In that process, I'd discovered that starting with the dances often got me to an interesting place, and it worked particularly well for the RRR vid I made. So, I took the first dance sequence from Barbie and slapped it over the song. Then I watched it a dozen times, thinking about what story that dance number was telling. It became clear pretty quickly that Ken, as the film's main antagonist, was important in Barbie's journey to selfhood, and that I would need to include him in the vid after all. I also realised that the reason my instincts had glommed onto Le Freak, and not any of the other dozens and dozens of songs I'd listened to in a mad flurry, was because the dolls in Barbie are complete F R E A K S (and also very, very chic), and it was interesting to see how many different ways I could explore that in the vid.

There's an interesting playfulness in the movie - we're meant to take the personhood of the dolls seriously, even though a lot of their characterisation is satire. But at the same time, the way the dolls are played with in the "real" world shows two different narratives. In one, especially in the opening which spoofs the movie 2001, we're shown that Barbie dolls were important when they were first launched because they helped girls see themselves as more than future mothers. This is the Mattel marketing spin. In the movie 2001, the bone that gets tossed up in the air is the first weapon, used to commit the first murder, and the tossed old-style doll in Barbie is signalling a similar murder - the death of the patriarchy. A pretty big claim, although played for laughs. Then, on the other hand, there are these scenes of Barbie dolls being drop-kicked and scribbled on and so on. The implication being that they're just dolls in the end - disposable, temporary. They are meant to be played with and are not that precious. These two narratives coexist, but there's a tension there -- Barbies are both important and not. They are part of child's play which doesn't have a lot of value in the adult world, but child's play is what helps children grow up into well-balanced adults. That duality is interesting, and it's threaded throughout the movie as a kind of leavening, so that the big claims and branding come across as self-aware and in on the joke instead of crass and pompous marketing.

When I started editing, I began with the beach fight between the Kens, because I needed to establish their antagonism to be able to get to Barbie's breakdown for the climax. It was a no-brainer to put in some clips of them dancing to start establishing that as a through line too, but it took a while for me to realise that I needed to add in the clips of the girls playing with Barbie dolls as well. At first I did it, because it made the whole thing funnier -- these men waging "war" with their bright colours and frisbees, compared to the complete brutality of the girls attacking their dolls with dinosaurs and setting them on fire. But after I'd cut that sequence, I could see how to get to Barbie's breakdown using the same device, and how to visually tie in how important Gloria was as the bridge between real-world childhood play and the Barbie world's more ideological importance as a way for girls (in this case Barbie) to dream bigger. It was actually surprisingly hard to do Gloria justice because there just aren't as many clips of her, or of her and Barbie, as you think there are when you first see the film. So the clips of the dolls became the glue that made it all work.

I loved the ending I managed to craft, but I really wish there was one more strong clip of Gloria and Barbie together. Perhaps if I hadn't been so pushed for time, I would have come up with something else to add that extra grace note. Sometimes you just have to stop though, and I'm happy with where I got to in the time I had. I think I captured some of my ideas about the development of Barbie's personhood and how it was linked to her letting her freak flag fly.

A few other highlights...

Editing the Kens and their magical orgasm of sexual healing. I cackled so hard as I vidded that. If you want to download this, I recommend the enormous MP4 because that effect looks best in that version.

The wave transition effect I used to add some extra visual interest. As is so often the case when I add an effect these days, I added the first one to solve a technical issue - the switch back from the black-clad dancing Kens to the brightly coloured beach Kens was a simple cut in the original, but I needed it to have a bit more emphasis. I have a rule now that if I add an effect once, I have to go back and look at the vid as a whole and see if it makes sense to add it at least two other places. If the answer is no, I take it out and find another solution. If it's yes, then I add it in and use as part of an ongoing theme. In this case, it was a resounding yes, as it increased the cheesiness in a fun way, but also helped to emphasise the "freak/freak-out" lyrics at key points.

Finally, the opening sequence. I vidded that last, and by then I'd figured out how important the clips of dolls were, so I decided to use the cartoon Barbie and Ken from the end credits. That was easy enough - I just cut out the credits, and in the holes I laid in some establishing shots of Barbie and the two Kens to set the scene. The tricky bit was that the animation for Barbie has her taking off her sunglasses and tossing them aside, and the hole I'd made meant that half of that animation was also cut out. So I had to go in and create a mask of the sunglasses frame-by-frame and add them back over the top. Just that one bit of editing took pretty much a whole day, which was a lot given that the deadline for go-live was looming. I'm pretty sure most people didn't even notice it or pay it any real attention - which is a sign I did the effect right. But it amuses me that I spent all that time on an effect that's basically invisible.

Anyway, that's Barbie. My sixth and final vid for festivids this year.