50 Shades Of Black: Film Analysis

On this assignment’s handout Professor Bozek wrote, “Podcast and films require careful planning, recording, and editing, which means that a 1-3 minute film … will probably be plenty of work.” I glanced over this statement with little concern and it wasn’t until the 8TH hour of editing when I finally learned how to blend frames together that I realized how true those words were. In my research paper, “50 Shades of Black: Colorism within Black Hollywood”, I discussed how the content young children, specifically in the black community, view on tv is skewed by the ideals of colorism. Lighter skin complexions are portrayed as the standards for societal acceptance, leaving all negative qualities to be expressed by darker tones. To combat this view, I created a public service announcement (PSA) with the intention of it running as a commercial break so that children who are potentially already watching shows affected by colorism will see it and learn to love themselves and that the complexion they were born with does not define who they …show more content…
In these commercials they ask participants to perform activities, such as running, throwing a ball and fighting, “like a girl”. Each person performed the actions in a “girly” manner. Following them, young girls are asked the same to perform the same task “like a girl”, but they did them normally. After seeing the young girls perform the actions normally, the original participants redid their actions normally as well, regretting acting what they deemed girly in the first place. The PSA ended by with a call to action, to make “like a girl” mean only positive things and remove the negative connotations typically associated with it. I aimed to mimic this style of PSA by showing negative footage of black kids affected by colorism (DixonFuller2011) and then interviews with older black volunteers that will react to and counteract the statements made by the