In this sketch, we essentially wanted to parody the skate video genre, a genre that is now most prominent online. Skate videos tend to have little in the way of narrative, as they often follow a loose structure similar to that of a music video. In our parody of the video type, we wanted to keep this loose structure, meaning we had to add a narrative element more subtly. We chose to incorporate this through use of character, as the central personality of the sketch provides most of the humour. Through the cuts to Sam’s face, who is clearly not the person doing the skating(obvious due to costume, facial and location differences), the video takes on an amateurish feel, similar to what we tried to achieve in our project two sketches.
Another element we noticed was prevalent in several skate videos was the strong use of transitions. Generally, these transition types tend to have a great deal of variety, but for our sketch we wondered what effect the overuse of the same transition type would have. What we again found was that it made the work seem amateurish, as sometimes the repeated ‘film burn’ effect would be so overused that it even cut off the character’s dialogue. There is also comedy in the way that this poor and amateurish editing clashes with the skater’s definite confidence in himself and his ability – which is clearly doubted by the audience due to the content accompanying him.
The hybrid nature of this sketch comes mostly from the combination of the narrative element of character with the non-narrative, or at least looser narrative, of the skate video genre.
