Hello lovely Patrons!
We just wrapped on our next episode, working title Conversion Therapy: An Analysis. This is a massive project, the biggest we've ever done in terms of research. I've got a very rough edit partially done and it's currently clocking in around 2 hours long.
The editing is probably going to take a while on account of it being quite technically complicated (and also I have Blink to rehearse) and I'm not sure how well it'll do in terms of numbers, but it has the potential to be a fairly important intervention in the national discourse, so I'm proud of the effort we've put in! This is the kind of thing that only Philosophy Tube can be!
Here's some pics from the set:
These are just a few of the sources I read for this video. We'll start by looking at the history of conversion practices from 1849-the present day. There's a lot of ground to cover but it'll help us identify the key assumptions underpinning the practice.
This spectacular dress was made by designed Brian De Carvalho, and it's made of old medical records and government documents! Britain has printed so much paperwork on this issue, all of it generally useless, so we turned it into an incredible fashion piece!
And we had a special guest on set!
Chickens are very important to the history of conversion practices, so we hired a live chicken, Hettie, to help us tell the story!
Hettie is a professional acting/modelling chicken. She came with two animal handlers to look after her welfare on set, she had as many breaks as she needed and food and water available at all times
I was honestly shocked by how well behaved Hettie was. I blocked out two days to shoot her stuff, allowing for chicken shenanigans buffer time, but she was so good we got all her shots in one day!
Brian Conway was the stylist who commissioned this outfit, and he did an amazing job as always! In my brief to him I called it 'The Paper Woman.' Since we'll be going through so many documents and records I wanted a look that seemed as if they had come to life!
For this episode I hired experts in biology, journalism, law, and healthcare policy to fact-check and review the script. I also got a defamation lawyer to check it over and make sure we weren't defaming anybody because we do need to talk about some contemporary figures...
My hair and makeup was done by Nicki Buglewicz, and she did an incredible job as always.
The hair for this look was so insanely complicated and involved a lot of folding pieces and hairspray!
Here's the dress in all its glory with its magnificent train!
Have some more just for fun lol
This is from our second day of filming! This look I styled myself out of my own clothes, I called it 'Rebel Chic'
That tank top was actually a gift from Vivian Wilson
As you can see we'll be talking not just about the history of conversion practices but also the legal and philosophical arguments around banning it, and why that can be a tricky subject, like whether there should be loopholes for religion or "consent" and so on
Again we used the paperwork theme in constructing the set, I think it worked really well, it's very artsy
This might be an avant-garde choice for thumbnail tbh...
This also goes hard
Nicki did the hair and makeup again for this look and she kicked ass as always!
It was a really fun two days on set! Considering how demanding and complicated this video is I think this was one of the smoothest shoots we've ever had