Kate Brinkley, Co-Owner CrossFit Big Guava
Darren DeRochemont, Co-Owner CrossFit Big Guava
CrossFit Big Guava
Project Description
This will be a fragmented narrative film with a man and a woman performing the same workout over a period of time. The grid will be composed of different shots as they progress through the workout. However, there will also be shots in the grid that are empty shots, just an empty space in the gym simply filling a void.
CrossFit Headquarters announced last year at the 2018 CrossFit games that transgender athletes will be able to legally compete in their gender identity. The testosterone levels will be monitored for everyone in the same testing as they do for steroids to ensure that no one is getting an unfair advantage from an aggressive amount of testosterone to build more strength. This piece is meant to really challenge the viewer to look at how gendered bodies move in the sport of fitness and what does it mean for a workout to be scaled for a woman versus a man. Gender plays an intricate part of our everyday lives. However, the individuals who identify somewhere on the spectrum of male and female do not have a place in sports, this time specifically the sport of fitness where men and women train alongside each other daily and can compete on co-ed teams. There is still a forced identity on to these people within the gender binary, there is no room for the in between.
Time Line
January 29, 2019: Submit Proposal
January 30 - February 1, 2019: Shoot at CrossFit Big Guava in Tampa, FL
January 31 - February 4, 2019: Edit and Export Final Product
February 5, 2019: Exhibit at The University of Tampa
Materials
DSLR Camera: Nikon D3300
SD Card
1TB External Hard Drive
Laptop
Adobe Premiere Pro
2 Athletes (One Male, One Female)
CrossFit Equipment (Pull Up Bar, BarBells, Jump Ropes, etc.)
Project Update #1 (Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019)
Prior to shooting The Gendered Sport of Fitness, or any project I like to plan out what I want my frames to be in some rough sketches. The following was a quick little sketch I did to plan out where I ideally was thinking about having the frames in the grid and what they would be. I wanted to divide up the body and split it into head, torso, legs in the frames to really emphasize the movement of the body and less about the person in their entirety moving. I want to rotate through the different sets of three frames, but with a goal of no more than two minutes for its entirety I may not. As I go out to start shooting tomorrow we'll see what changes are made during shooting, and after during editing.
Project Update #2 (Monday Feb. 4, 2019)
Well, it's 1:30am and I'm at Tampa General Hospital in the Emergency Room getting treated for some kind of respiratory infection. I started to look towards Nico Tortorella's book of poetry All Of It Is You, it's a kind of holy text of spoken word poetry that I turn to in times of strife. I began to think about the power their spoken word has had on me in multitudes of ways. So, I decided that I would do a spoken word over this film instead of leaving it silent.
Project Update #3 (Tuesday Feb. 5, 2019
One should never procrastinate because you don't know when you're going to end up with a 102 degree temperature with a viral upper respiratory infection. Thankfully, today we're feeling much better and haven't had a fever in twenty four hours. However, now after being sick for the last four days we're just now finishing up the project. I get my best work from high stress situations because I tend to filter less and the rawness comes through. I'm thrilled with the final project and look forward to sharing it with everyone.
This fragmented nonlinear narrative film is the story of a WOD. A Workout Of the Day is what WOD stands for. I myself am a CrossFit athlete, committing hours a week to painful sets of heavy weights, lots of cardio, some blood, a lot of sweat, and tears too. CrossFit took the fitness world by storm in becoming the "sport of fitness" with the annual CrossFit Games beginning over a decade ago. However, it wasn't until last year at the 2018 CrossFit Games that it was announced that starting in 2019 that transgender athletes could compete in the gender they identify with. While this is a major milestone in a sport that can be a lot of macho masculinity, we have forgotten about an entire group of people.
This film is to bring attention to the people who don't exist in the binary of male and female, or cisgender and transgender. This is for the nonbinary people who are just as addicted to the sport of fitness as the rest of us crazy CrossFitters. The spaces left empty with no one working out is for those people who still don't have a place in the competition aspect of the sport of fitness.
A special thanks to Darren DeRochemont, Kate Brinkley, and CrossFit Big Guava of the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, Florida for helping out in this project and continuing the fight for gender equality for all genders.