The robotic women of The Stepford Wives film highlight the dark side of the narrow life allowed to women across the world. With women still being held to similarly strict standards of beauty and expectations of behavior in 2021, there are parallels between the characters I know in real life and the ones that were portrayed in this 1975 film. Inspired by Nadia Lee Cohen’s characters I was motivated to see if I could emanate her style by working with makeup and wigs to capture my own robotic characters.

Across two separate days, I attempted two shoots with the majority of time spent putting on wigs and makeup. I also managed to print a 70s wallpaper print on A1 paper as a background for one of the shoots. It was my main aim to be able to distinguish as much as possible between the two shoots whilst the constants being the format of head and shoulders and myself as the subject. Not being particularly experienced with MUA, this was a challenge for me. Another challenge was trying to ‘play’ my characters as unfeeling and mechanical, certain images show more successful dead-behind-the-eyes expressions than others.

Upon reviewing the shoots this character expression is the most successful in a short clip of footage. On top of the moving image providing more space for the characterful expressions to unfold, the use of a low-quality point-and-shoot camera has made the footage visually more authentic and low-fi.