Animation concept and design by Neal Coghlan

Street to Glamour – Changing Identities

Project Concept

This idea has been developed by photographer, Misako Devereux, using a young actress, Maddi Burns Hunt, to visualise the concept.

The images above show an example of a proposed photography project. Fashion photography, in general, works to construct a world of fiction. The audience is presented with an illusion, to perceive as reality, or possibly to become victim of the commodity sales of fashion industries.

The reality of a young girl caught up in sex trafficking is from the world of fact, in conflict with the world of glamour and fashion. There is no doubt her life is an example of hard reality. Young women who belong to this reality are a world apart from the fashion industry that is the arena of fiction.

To see her cross over, between the real world where she exists, to the fashion shoot as a model, would be very interesting. The photography of the two identities in two locations, street and studio, with the same model presents a fascinating prospect. Fashion and fashion photography are deeply related to our feelings about our body and identity. This is a problem for some individuals, who are lacking self-esteem, yet this could be transformed and boosted by makeup and clothing to be chosen for the photographed images.

When the non-professional model displays a confidence it is a form of positive difference, signaling to the audience a sense of new self image and self-esteem. The girl’s anonymity will be protected during the fashion photography sessions by make up methods together with specific fashion materials for example using a mask, or lace over the face.

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If you would like to get involved in sponsoring the campaign or working with us, please contact us.

On line interactive drama series for web and mobile

The short film we have made will be a reference point for developing the on line drama series for two reasons. First, the film itself draws on powerful testimony from a creative writing project with trafficked girls that produced some riveting stories and poems and it has already proved popular with a teenage audience. And second, both the film and a pop video cut from the same footage will be going into schools right across the country which creates a mass audience who has already been introduced to the story. We will use this to build a strong teenage following for the on line series and related x platform activities.

Brief synopsis: Jade, 14, escapes her troubled home life by fantasizing about becoming a pop singer, bunking off school to hang out with her mates. She’s picked up by charming Raz who offers her excitement, fast cars, parties, and the thing she craves…love. As Jade falls under his spell, Raz asks her to be ‘nice’ to a record producer who will help them. Desperate to please Raz, Jade agrees, so beginning her dark slide into entrapment. Jade is trafficked, locked up, and forced to have sex with countless men, until one day she risks escape…

Using this core story as a starting point, we want to develop new narrative threads focused around Amber, the feisty, mixed race, best friend of Jade. Amber’s journey will provide an exciting way of giving different angles on Jade’s story. After having fun for a bit, and wondering about her friend, Jade, but not seriously, Amber starts to get serious about what’s happening to Jade and goes looking for answers. Amber becomes a bit like a feisty teen detective, putting herself in jeopardy, and so creating a story that could grip the attention of a teenage audience as she is forced to make tough choices…

This will be done in short, lo fi, interactive web / mobisodes engaging the teenage audience in the choices Amber takes – what happens next? Should she put herself at risk in order to find her friend?: you decide, that sort of approach…

From her character web page, Amber will start a ‘Free Jade’ campaign and encourage her fans to join it. She could ask her fans to design badges and t shirts etc. We can also build the following by repeat ‘screening’ the webisodes, for e.g. first on Bebo then repeating on youtube, myspace etc, and pinging them to mobile.

The drama will be augmented by documentary video blogs, written character blogs, polls, comments received and replied to in character etc. It’s another way of looking at the core ‘young girl seduced by loverboy’ story, but this time with a feisty character of our audience’s age (Amber) to take us through it.

On the successful conclusion of the ‘Free Jade’ campaign, we could host a whole day ‘event’, where we bring all the content together and all the webisodes are screened over a 12 hour period tied in with a virtual (or live) concert. Once ‘freed’, Jade could have a character page, publish her ‘diary’ of poems and drawings and spread the word to other girls who have been involved in the same experience.

We want to use the power and immediacy of documentary film making to reveal the reality of internal trafficking. The young girls (and boys) who have been lured into the sex industry and then trafficked around the UK have told us some shocking stories that reveal a side of life in Britain in the 21st Century that demands to be told. Internal Trafficking is about cynical people exploiting the weak and vulnerable, but it is also closely associated with poverty, lack of opportunity and the way in which social services that are supposed to support and protect people, sometimes fail to do so.

Our work with outreach organisations such as Barnardos in Middlesborough and Streetreach in Doncaster has brought us into contact with young people who have experienced abuse, pain and betrayal that thankfully most of us will never have to ensure. They want to tell their stories, partly to warn others about what to look out for, but also as a way of recovering from trauma.

Using a range of documentary story telling techniques, from observational to drama reconstruction and from photography to animation, we want to bring the issue of internal trafficking into the open. We want our documentaries to provoke discussion and debate that leads to real change, perhaps in the way that the gritty drama-documentary ‘Kathy Come Home’ did back in the 1960’s.