For this project I was advised to prioritise the sensation of film rather than the narrative. This was difficult for me to rationalise as whenever I create something it is within an act structure and the notion of a film being exclusively about the sensation seemed antithesis in regards to structure. However i’m also a big fan of comedy and talk shows, and from my immediate knowledge is that comedic stories or late night shows don’t follow an act structure in the slightest but instead all establishing the setup for a bigger punchline. The example i’d use is The Eric Endre show which maintains a talk show structure in its intro – interview – street prank – musical guest format, but these segments almost build to nothing, relying on its absurdism to drive the humour for the audience.

When studying how to craft an atmosphere in a film, all my results pinned towards two aspects of editing: Colour grading and Music. The idea of colour grading stems from how film director’s exploit audiences colour connection and how we associate colours with specific emotions, as per Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions illustrates. The leading tend in Hollywood is the blue and orange colour palette with the understanding being that due to our skin tone being closest to the orange color spectrum, and blue being the opposite side of that spectrum, through the juxtaposing colours it enables actors and actresses to stand out more against the background. However given that my film is in a late night talk show format, I was unsure on how to exactly colour grade the footage to evoke any emotion, however the idea to brighten the yellow colours to mimic The Johnny Carson show came to mind, the idea to also add a shade of blue to replicate the 90’s Late Night aesthetic did as well. I toyed around with these colours and couldn’t decide if they worked and ultimately left the footage as it was, with only fixing the exposure in some shots as I felt that the colour grading was distracting me too much when watching and making me aware of what I was watching, which was not the reaction I was aiming for.

For this project I wanted to focus on the laugh track and how laughter influences audiences enjoyment of a show. Thus this inspired me to want to create a film where audiences would become aware of that influence and question why someone would laugh or applause at what the show or film is demanding them to react to. I couldn’t find any research on how colour could drive humour outside of specific colouring in regards to romantic films or comedies which would utilise a saturated red tone, I felt that the colouring was ultimately not essential in crafting that sensation. Which leaves music.

There are many instances where changing the music of a scene could greatly change the tone of the scene. For a recent example the countless videos of replacing the music in Childish Gambino’s “This is America” to for example “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsin. Another more relevant example for my research project is the re-edit of Mrs Doubtfire as a kind family comedy to a Horror Drama film or for a TV example, editing out the laugh tracks in a scene of Friends where Ross overreacts to someone eating his sandwich showcasing the characters borderline psychopathic tendencies. The context of the audio in accompaniment is crucial in crafting the tone of a scene, which is why in my film I play with the dark and ominous ambiance of a scene with a sharp juxtaposition with the artificial, like a quick peak through the keyhole to see through it. I did this to key audiences into the self-aware nature of the show which I felt was in the interest of the sensation as the unease would further drive audiences to further think about what was being presented to them.

Furthermore, a case where this failed I believe was for a Polish vlogger Lukasz Jakobiak who on his youtube channel made a video where he went to see a fake Ellen and tried to pass it off as a meta reality where he believed he was actually on the Ellen DeGeneres show, in service of his motivational speaking belief of “if you dream it, it will be a reality.” Personally I believe this video to be a joke whereas some were extremely uncomfortable with the man’s excitement and drive to perfectly replicate Ellen’s set. Because audiences can be reactionary, I think the lack of obvious self-awareness immediately mortified audiences into believing that Jakobiak was also seeing this as an extension of reality.

In addition to music however I was thinking of driving the comedy with associative images. There is the infamous interview with Alfred Hitchcock discussing cutting and Sergei Eisenstein’s Soviet Montage theory, illustrating how four scenes of an old man seeing a woman and their child playing can be interpreted differently by the order. If the man sees the woman playing with the child and smiles, he is a kind man, but if he focuses on the woman and the same smile is shown, he is a pervert. For me, this was where most of my sensation building was going to come from in addition to music. A happy accident with filming was that I had the entire footage instead of the segments we recorded which allowed for me in editing to pull moments where the actors assumed they weren’t being recorded and managed to turn it into a part of the film and make those moments of authenticity part of the artificiality. This aspect also further interested me in my research of Garry Shandling and his thematic links of expressing how people should act as they do in real life as they do on the camera. By reversing this, I felt that maybe in a reverse way I was combating Shandling’s ideology, or maybe reinforcing it.

Thus, through editing of the laugh track, ambient music and cutting scenes into an assembly, I attempted to create a sensation and audience participation in doubt as to what they are being told to respond to and how they should respond.

References:

Heuvel, J. (2017). Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions: What is it and How to Use it in Counseling?. [online] Positivepsychologyprogram.com. Available at: https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/emotion-wheel/ [Accessed 12 Oct. 2018].

LUCAS JACOBIAK BE AWESOME (2017). Visualization Level Up – Me and Beata! My way to reach Ellen!. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdBymvIpVu8 [Accessed 14 Oct. 2018].

Wight, E. (2017). Polish vlogger builds fake Ellen DeGeneres show | Daily Mail Online. [online] Dailymail.co.uk. Available at: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4335506/Polish-vlogger-tricks-Ellen-DeGeneres-show.html [Accessed 14 Oct. 2018].