Making Her Way to the Ring

For my Digital Storytelling course, I had a semester long project of makinga documentary on the topic of my choice with some sort of critical perspective involved. As a fan of professional wrestling, I decided to focus my documentary on a young woman named Amber Dabney from the Richmond, Virginia area who is training to be a professional wrestler.

When I first pitched the project, I was planning on focusing the documentary on sexism in the professional wrestling industry as in the past, women in professional wrestling promotions were mainly viewed as eye candy for their male counterparts rather than actual wrestlers. In the top tier wrestling promotion, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) during the 1990s and 2000s, the female wrestlers were called "divas" and the majority of them were known for their sex appeal rather than their actual wrestling skills. However, within the past 3-2 years, there has been a women's wrestling revolution in a sense, with an increase of focus on wrestling skills being emphasized among the female competitors and a decrease in sex appeal. In fact, several women have become the big talent in various wrestling promotions including WWE. And it became clear after my first initial interview with Amber, that there wasn't any clear cut signs of sexism (at least at this local level of the industry), so I had to change the direction of the documentary.

That lead to the documentary being focused on Amber's journey to being a professional wrestling and why it's appropriately named "Making Her Way to the Ring."

Making Her Way to the Ring with Commentary

This edit includes my commentary where I discuss how I met Amber, what it was like to film a topic like this and the reasoning behind some of my artistic choices.

Wrestling Moves in Slo-Mo

Here are a couple of videos I took on my phone of different moves during Amber's training sessions.

Deleted Interview

Here's a short clip of one of Amber's interview where she discussed what it was like being the only female trainee in GXW as well as being in a male dominated industry.

What's Next?

This documentary is certainly far from over, as there are some certain editing changes that need to be made but also beceuase Amber is still in the training phrase. However, her current trainer Robert Cropper believes that she is ready to for her first match. My plan is to continue to document her journey until at least her first match, but hopefully I will continue past that. Who knows? I may be documenting the trials and journey of a future WWE Women's Champion.