VIDEO PRODUCTION, POSTPRODUCTION & VFX SERIES

An Aesthetic Approach

If you’re reading this article, you’re a total sick fuck, but don’t worry, this isn’t clickbait since I’m an employed academic with a PhD and stuff and I wouldn’t do that do you as a professional courtesy.

Sometimes, when making videos, there’s a practical aesthetic and media designerly need to get genitalia into your video because it makes sense in context, but you also kinda know that Youtube and other media platforms might take your content down for violating their content policy which no one reads because a) the font is too small, b) there’s too much of that small font and c) you need a law degree to understand it anyway.

As I’ve successfully incorporated representations of genitalia in my onlinr Music videos, I thought it academically appropriate to open access my professional knowledge as a kind of ‘tips and tricks’ in case you have similar needs in your own video production and publication in social media.

Vagina

First, the vagina, since that’s the first naughty item named in this article’s title. For that, Davinci Resolve’s mirror effect came in super handy, in order to make a vaginal shape of a woman, as shown above. The image below shows the woman after the mirror effect has evolved to reveal the source of this very brief saucy spicy imagery.

When I began making the video, I didn’t realize that I’d eventually need to show a vagina, but here was a creative predicament — I had created a video about an alien invasion in which our super powerful planetary visitors just start terraforming our planet and altering our bodies without applying for permits or asking for anyone’s permission.

A trope of music videos is Dancing Women and so the video has some scenes of dancing women. However, I didn’t really just want these dancing women to be in my video for the usual purposes of general sexualization of women, patriarchal oppression etc. but rather I wanted them to serve an actual plot purpose.

That purpose was in essence an homage to the X-Files and Dana Scully in particular — the whole storyline around William (her son), her alien-snatched eggs and the super secret government-alien conspiracy to create human-alien hybrids.

So, in a nutshell, I used the dancing women as a transition to the hybridized human zygotes with the techno-alien transhuman DNA alterations, and in order to do that, I sorta needed to quickly go inside a vagina, visually speaking, to get there.

This short sequence of imagery is my fanboy dedication crush homage or whatever to Gillian Anderson aka Dana Scully, who btw went to acting school at my undergrad alma mater, DePaul University in Chicago, go Blue Demons.

Penis

Now that we’ve covered how vagina’s can be tastefully suggested artistically speaking using a simple mirroring effect in a video editor to induce symmetry onto almost anything that can be made to look like a vagina, let’s touch on the phallus.

While no YouTube censor has yet to email me about my momentary glimpse at my X-Files inspired ‘orificial transition’ (that’s the official term used in film theory), I did receive an email from YouTube saying that they had blocked my video for Cosmic Ray Juice due to its ‘shocking content.’

I successfully lodged a counterclaim and won, so the video was allowed to remain on YouTube. Here is a moment in the video that is oh so shockingly penis-like:

This actually rather non-organic imagery is simply a two-sided visualization of the music’s spectrum unfolding in real time, courtesy of FL Studio’s ZGameEditor Visualizer.

The spectral profile of the music is of the ‘smiley face’ variety which doesn’t mean what you think it might, but rather simply indicates that the low and high frequencies are generally of greater amplitude than the middle frequencies, which produces a kind of throbbing phallic effect as the music track progresses.

Based on this justification, YouTube lifted its ban and has permitted the video to remain live, so just know that you can successfully argue against a YouTube censor, if you have a legitimate creative rationale.

I have also exhibited this music video in film festivals such as the Rock and Roll Film Festival (in Kenya) and the Willlachen Comedy & Satire Filmprize (in Austria) where it was a quarter finalist and official Honorable Mention, so I think this shows that phallus imagery is not just universal, but can even be considered to be funny!

Here’s my official artist statement on FilmFreeway, because sometimes you need to use just the right words as a kind of social lubricant to make the artistic concept go down properly.

This music video is comprised of a stereo spectrographic waveform. One may have to admit that it seems to have phallic connotations in its imagery, but that is a byproduct of the waveform visualization, since the mix profile is of the ‘smiling face’ variety — i.e., low midrange levels compared to higher levels of bass and high end frequencies.

Phallic images, however, are amongst the most revered, ancient and sacred of mythological symbols. I did get an email from a YouTube censor stating that this video contained ‘shocking content’ but I appealed their ban and the video is still live on their platform : )

The Videos

So there you have it, two successful artistic strategies for getting male and female genitalia to glide past YouTube’s actual human or artificially algorithmic censors. You can view the music videos below, to see how this imagery works in context, as it may inspire you to disseminate your own seminal video works in a similar manner.

How to Get Vaginas & Penises Past YouTube’s Video Censors was originally published in Sound & Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.