How does Elaine show identity performance when changing her persona before people see her versus when a video call comes in at the end of the short and how does this relate to the work of Erving Goffman and Erica Pearson?

The animation our group made shows a woman named Elaine going through her working from home life, something that we have now had lots of experience in and was inspired by our time as full time students during the COVID pandemic. In the short we see Elaine's descent from strong and highly strung, i.e. sat at her desk working, far from food and without distraction and throughout her time she slowly descends into a state of mental collapse where she finds herself on the floor where she is sitting down with crumbs covering her clothes and food wrappers all around her, she is at this point showing her truest form of her and as Goffman would say in her backstage behavioural identity in that there is no barriers put up that make her look cleaner and there is no 'performance' more importantly. She is the snapped out of this rawer backstage version of her persona that shows what she is like when she is left alone for too long and doesn't need to cover up her edges, she is video called by a person who is clearly someone who isn't allowed to see this raw persona and identity and Elaine is left in shock as to what to do in the situation as she cant snap out of it very quickly and is forced to interact with others in this state and this wouldn't be in her interest and this is the end of the story leaving the viewer to wonder what happens next. 

I conducted research on the topic using the work of Erica Pearson's work by the title "All the World Wide Web’s a stage: The performance of identity in online social networks"(2009). I used google scholar to find this work. This was a suitable piece of work as it shows performance and identity using social media which creates the issue of peoples persona and identity in real life as opposed to on the internet when no one is actually watching, this is exactly what the character Elaine is being challenged with when she is called at the end of the short. In the piece by Pearson she says that people online have the ability to "claim to be whoever they wish" which is again the situation that Elaine finds her self in is that no one can see what is going on behind the camera before she is on her work calls and when she is knocking about the apartment all day she starts to find herself losing the façade she put up in the absence of other peoples presence. Pearson says that it isn't news that peoples identity is a performance however you could argue in Elaine's case that her identity isn't truly seen until she is left at home alone for long periods of time, this made her breakdown her social barriers and ultimately find herself in a badly timed mess on the floor when she is called.

Another bit of research I did was on Goffman's ideas of identity performance as stated in Pearson's work it is clear that she drew inspiration from Goffman and quoted his work throughout hers. "Goffman uses the term ‘performance’ to refer to all the activity of an individual in front of a particular set of observers, or audience". this is pertinent in the case of Elaine as we can see a clear differentiation in when she is left without other people who represent the audience or the observers and she begin to see the identity below that. Erving Goffman also presents the idea of front and back stage performance which is a theatrical metaphor that explains what the person does when they are in the front of the stage i.e. people can see them, and what they do at the back of the stage i.e. what people do when no one is looking. This again relates to Elaine's case as she doesn't have anyone she needs to perform to when she is at home as she lives in a flat alone and then she is interrupted by the phone going off and she then realises that she has to put her performance back on to hide what she really is like under her social barrier or 'performance'. This was in the end kept in the final part of my research as I believed it was very clear and very important, as the viewer was able to clearly see the 2 stages of Elaine's personality throughout the short. This is of course a story which is about the 2 personas of the character and there is nothing the viewer would have to assume to get to these two theories and would to be honest be able to quite easily link them to the animation.

Using these 2 bits of key research allowed me to see the character Elaine as no longer a single dimensional character but as rather a more 3D character with flaws and layers that I wasn't able to see not to say that these flaws weren't evident in the initial edit of the animation but it became clear that I was overlooking crucial character developments that weren't apparent to me before this research on persona, performance and identity was conducted. 

For this research I considered involving the fact that the character was a female and exploring her femininity as a young woman who will likely have only been out of her childhood home for less than ten years or so meaning that there will likely be a connection to the home still even if she has been out for a while. This lead me onto a piece of work by Lisa A Zanetti from 2002 called "Leaving our fathers’ house: Micrologies, archetypes, and barriers to conscious femininity in organizational contexts" This work looks into what it is for a woman to leave her childhood home away from her father and the challenges this would make to her life and her social decisions. This lead me onto the point of trying to figure out if there could be a connection between the fact that she is now an adult but still elects to live on her own, is this a subconscious choice of hers as she doesn't want a male figure in the house as this could take her back to when she was young and her relationship with her father even though it wasn't necessarily a negative relationship she is still in the part of her life where she doesn't want to associate with her parents at all and wants a chance at living on her own. Zanetti says that leaving the fathers house is hard and important as this is where the persons cultural and social understanding built and likely influenced so to move out of this would be a big change to a person as this would open them to a lot of new ideas and ways of thinking, now in Elaine's case she was possibly thinking about the fact that she wouldn't need a dominant paternal tone to influence her decisions and way of thinking and therefore elected to live on her own again possibly subconsciously as a way to create her own character and her own persona when she had to chance to leave the "fathers house". This part of the research was in the end taken from the title and not really thought about in the final edit of the animation as I think it would be far too distracting and also a bit far fetched to say that this clearly very simple character has this enormous backstory or subplot to her that is completely invisible to the audience. This was ultimately not obvious enough for this short animation and if the animation was instead a full length feature film it would have been possible to explore the character in this level of depth but it just seemed foolish to try and do that with this level of character as she isn't particularly well developed in terms of back story except for what you see on the screen.

In conclusion I think I only chose the parts of the research that were absolutely essential to the character and there story and didn't include anything that wasn't relevant or far fetched and I think it was important to do this.