The main way I hope our final artifact engages the audience is through comedy (obviously) and making the audience laugh. Our short film has taken the form of a story sketch, which is what the class looked at in week 3. From the reading ‘Story Sketches’, Joe Toplyn describes a story sketch’s structure as a beginning that gets you excited, a middle that grips you and an end that delivers. (Toplyn, 2014). Toplyn then goes on to describe the nine steps to creating a story sketch, while when we were writing the script we weren’t looking at this, in the end, our film adheres to a lot of these unintentionally. we have characters with exaggerated traits, specifically the character of Kevin who is by far the most exaggerated character, being an outcast to the story and where most of the comedy derives from. Our short film differs from Toplyn’s structure by not having Kevin as a main character and instead having him play the side character, with the main characters of Adam and Josh being more similar to the straight men in a comedic film, though they still have their quirks. We also incorporated elements of visual/silent comedy in the character of Kevin. A scene late in the film involves Kevin wordlessly walking into the ocean, with little to no reaction. This scene I think relates to the idea of ‘syllogism’ which in comedy refers to when what we see on screen is ‘intensely implausible’ yet when looking at it from a different line of reasoning reveals a ‘measure of plausibility’ (Marx & Sienkiewicz, 2018). In this case, Kevin walking into the water, the logical reasoning is that he would notice, become cold and turn around, but in reality, he continues walking until he disappears under the water, making this an ‘implausible situation’. However, if you look at the scene through the lens of him being under the drug, it reveals a level of plausibility within the universe of the film.
As a group we wanted our short film to have a lot of visual depth to it, being not just funny but also nice to look at, as we felt like a lot of comedy films often only focus on being ‘funny’ and not on any real visual aspect. One of the concerns of the studio was to think about how comedy can operate as a genre or mode in its own right, which I think directly ties into our want to make the film visually pleasing. Comedy is one of the few genres that are often looked down upon in both a critical sense and a scholarly sense, having much less of a focus on itself than other more ‘prestigious’ genres. In a 2012 study, Michael Arell had similar concerns, noting that he ‘always questioned why film comedy rarely seems to be recognised as possessing aesthetic value’ (Arell, 2012). One of the reasons Arell puts forward is that perhaps comedies are so diverse that there is no one-size-fits-all criteria to judge them, making it hard to discuss what makes one comedic film better than another. In my opinion, I think this is the most likely reason, much like how Horror films also struggle to get a lot of critical attention, again due to the subjective nature of that genre. Despite this though, even if the comedic elements of a film can be hard to judge, I don’t think this warrants not giving comedic films the time of day when it comes to the other elements that make the film, such as acting, score, cinematography etc. All this is to say that in the making of our film we wanted it to have artistic merit, not just in the comedy but every aspect, which hopefully ends up conveying the surprising depth of the comedy genre that we were taught in this studio.
If I were to keep working on our film, the main element I would ‘modify’ would be my acting, as I am not a good actor in the slightest and I think it’s very obvious in the film. Were we to have a longer shoot schedule it would have allowed more takes for scenes and for me to get my lines and delivery closer to an idea point, though I don’t think I’m awful in our final cut. Another aspect I would want to modify or improve would be making the hallucination scenes much more visually unique and interesting. I think in the time we had to film and edit our visuals were about as good as we could get, but were we to have longer, I would want to focus on creating cool and unique visuals that would give the film an extra layer of depth and flavour, which in turn would make it stand out among the other films from the class. Overall though I am very happy with how it turned out and I think it is a testament to my group’s teamwork with how much were were able to do in such little time.
Continuing on about my group’s collaboration, I think as a whole we worked extremely well together. We were all constantly on the same page about where we wanted our film to go and how we wanted to make it. Along with this, we were all willing to do anything to make the film possible, Giorgio especially deserves a shout-out for willingly going into the sea on a cold afternoon just to fulfil the vision of the film. We all communicated if one of us couldn’t make a meeting or was gonna be late so there was never any wondering where someone was. I think all this is reflected in the final product as It came together as a single unified vision which we are all proud of.
REFERENCES
Arell, M. (2012) Why are comedy films so critically underrated?, Digital Commons. thesis. Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/93/ (Accessed: 2024).
Marx, N. and Sienkiewicz, M. (2018) ‘The Logic of the Absurd’, in The Comedy Studies Reader. New York, New York: University of Texas Press, pp. 51–54.
Toplyn, J. (2014) ‘Story sketches’, in Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. Rye, New York: Twenty Lane Media, LLC, pp. 221–238.