My project, “whatta bunch of sheep!” explores TikTok micro-trends and aesthetics/cores as well as both the environmental and psychological effects that come from them.
In the early days of my project I was mainly interested in looking at the environmental damages that micro-trends cause and the chain that is involved with this. This chain being influencers posting about an item they want to promote, people watching this and being immediately influenced into buying it, finding it online, on a fast fashion website that has already picked up on the trend and mass produced the item in a completely non-environmentally friendly or moral way and ordering it to their houses within a week or even a couple days. Once everyone has this item it begins to decline and become uncool or “cheugy”. This item will either end up in a landfill or at the bottom of people’s closets to be forgotten about for years and then the cycle repeats.
As much as I enjoyed researching this side of my project due to feeling passionate about the environment, I struggled with feeling like I had to solve a problem, so instead I moved on to looking at titktok aesthetics and ‘cores’ and why our generation has developed the need to hyper-compartmentalise ourselves and latch on to these personas which only exist online. While I do believe that in recent years our generation has such a great variety of styles to experiment with, I also believe that these aesthetics can be so hyper-specific that no one really relates to them, so latching on to these personas becomes harmful as it erases true individual styles and personalities. I also found the idea of exposing what we show online versus what is behind the scenes most fascinating which is what eventually led to my final film idea, with the white screen reflecting what is shown on our phones/tiktok and then the end reveal being my actual bedroom and genuine self showing just how easy it is to deceive people behind a screen.
or you could just be yourself.