“Punched Out” revolved around the characters of 5 university students who are each stereotypes of different genres. We explored different genres depictions of an incident; the punch being spiked at a university function, and the events that follow.
The Characters ~
CHASTITY/ FAIRYTALE
Similar to…The virgin in every horror film, the naive and gullible friend, Kenneth in 30 Rock, Joey in Friends
Chastity is gullible, naive and sensitive. She is a “princess” who sees the world through rose tinted glasses, and wants to be loved by Baxter Marshall, her “prince charming”.
BAXTER MARSHALL / FILM NOIR
Physicality: Average height and build tending to slightness. Wears beige shorts, boat shoes and polo shirts.
Baxter’s father raised him to be a robust entrepreneur which riddled his young mind with fear of failure and rendered him competitive and petty.
Aspiration: Establish and grow a business, preferably in warehousing and distribution. Own a yacht that he can wear his ridiculous shoes on.
VINCENT SORROW / HORROR
Goth.
Vincent’s hobbies are painting, listening to music and playing the bass, all of which he practices meticulously in his downtime. By year ten he was a stereotypical Goth and held a small group of very loyal friends, all with similar artistic/noir interests.
JACK / MOCKUMENTARY
Similar To… Daria, April Ludgate (Parks + Rec)
Sarcastic, defensive and blunt. Jack does not empathise with the other character and is quick to judge their stereotypes.
TED / TEEN COMEDY
Ted is a stereotypical stoner, and a lost cause.
Similar to… every stoner/ skateboarder character in every teen comedy you’ve ever seen.
Great one-liners (“What’s got you down, sugar clown?”) and stares into space a lot. He is completely oblivious to how annoying everyone thinks he is.
This scene was originally intended to be performed by a set of puppets, fitting squarely within the fairy tale genre, however due to time and budget constraints this was not possible. The scene was filmed with Amy Williamson, an actress from Star Now and Dracy Moran, a fellow classmate due to an actor originally intended for the character of Ted dropping out. The rhyming of Ted’s dialogue was a suggestion during the writing process from Angus, and worked very well. The overall lack of control over the aesthetics ultimately lets down the fairy tale genre, however I am very happy with how the scene turned out. – Jen Farrow
This scene was filmed on the second day of shooting and we created to give context for the title “Punched Out” as the entire plot revolves around the spiking of a punch as a student run party. On the second day of filming, Amy Williamson the actress who played Chastity was unable to attend, therefore the costume, provided by Amy from the previous day was not available and Neeve, our classmate had to step in and take up the character of Chastity. This ended up working well, however one criticism would be to plan out more methodically a shot list, as during the editing process there wasn’t much footage to choose from and the vile and dropper were in the opposite hands, I therefore flipped the footage and zoomed in to make this less obvious, however there were no other close up shots to cut to so that I could condense the length of the scene. The overall effect worked well and the fairy tale aesthetic was completed with the use of colourful lights placed around the table.
“The Alliance” is a scene also a scene that is depicted in the Mockumentary genre. For the Film Noir/Political Thriller take on the scene, we edited it in greyscale and used Red Head lights to create harsh shadows of our two characters to set the scene, and make it more intense and quite serious and dramatic.
This was the first scene we shot at the start of principle photography: depicting the character Vincent and his perception of the world as a horror film. Within the script this scene represents the character Chastity tripping out on LSD and hallucinating Vincent turning into a rabbit. This culminates in a confrontation that renders Vincent both confused and afraid. When filming this scene we wanted to capture the paranoia reflected in the script and to a large extend the conceptual vision was achieved, the footage carrying a tension that is true to the genre.
The Mockumetary scenes portray the events of our story the way they actually took place, rather than being twisted by the other genres. This realistic version of events is presented through the character of Jack, and involves the character’s talking heads, to explain themselves.
These two scenes are over-exaggerated and extra cheesy. The character of Ted and the character of Chastity are extra-dopey and off with the fairies. The audience is made to see them as a joke, and Vince, in the second scene, the goth character, Vince serves the purpose of being the “relatable” character who is surrounded by bizarre personalities.
Final Trailer: