As expected, comedy is so much harder to do successfully than I thought. I think a lot of people think that it’s ‘easier’ to do because it doesn’t necessarily require high quality cinematography in order to be funny. I did not feel this way as I have friends doing comedy and knew that it is a highly underestimated art. However, what I have learnt about comedy is that writing comedy is difficult and you often need to work with others in order to come up with a well-rounded piece of work. As a whole, my idea of comedy has become more informed, through learning about different theories, aka. the science behind being funny.

I think we very successfully created our take on the American Vandal format of mockumentary / comedy-documentary. Our short is filled with comedic bits and jokes and takes the idea of a true crime documentary pretty seriously. Upon showing our friends who aren’t in the studio our rough cuts, we got many laughs and that is the main goal of comedy, so I definitely think we succeeded in that. Our main theory that inspired us throughout the process of writing and planning was ‘Benign Violation,’ one of the key theories we learnt about in class. This refers to when something is gently harmful, like the body’s response to tickling, where it seems there is a threat to one’s body but it isn’t enough for there to be actual harm, which leads to laughter (Warren & McGraw, 2015). When coming up with an incident that happens on the set, we knew it had to be serious enough for a cast member to be kicked off set but not enough to require criminal charges or have severe consequences. I think this, paired with the fact that Mira takes the whole investigation very seriously adds to the humour and hybridisation of comedy in Situation Tragedy. We were also inspired by an episode of Brass Eye, which is a fake news TV series (Meikle, 2012) which had more of a public commentary on a serious topic; drugs, whereas our social commentary was a lighthearted take on celebrity culture and fandom.

If we had more time to work on our film, I think we would have put more thought into the timing and editing stages, to ensure that it looks even more like a genuine true crime documentary. I think this would have really sealed the deal for it as a believable Netflix-style documentary. However, I do think that part of the charm is the detail of the documentary being made by a Twitter fan and not a professional. I think we would have more time to iron out some of the nitty gritty details, such as having filmed interview scenes in two seperate locations. Fixing small issues like this would probably elevate the project as a whole as well.

Another aspect of American Vandal that I would’ve liked to trial in our project is the crew members taking a bigger role in the storyline. Since we were limited to 20 minutes, we did not have a lot of time to explore that side of things, but perhaps if we had cut down some other parts of our story we could have included more ‘behind the scenes’ footage and give our character Mira more of a chance to tell her own story. Mockumentary is all about “performing authenticity” (Wallace, 2018) and I think that what made our story effective as all of our actors took their roles seriously and as if their wacky characteristics were real. I think that if we had more time, we could flesh out this character more and give her a chance to be even more comedically authentic and overly serious.

Working with other people in this studio has been really interesting. In terms of our group sketches, working with different people made it clear how important it is in comedy to find people with similar visions and comedy styles. Everyone laughs at different things so each comedy media product is not going to make everyone laugh. Hence, I think it is important to find a like-minded crowd and be really dedicated with that comedic style.

Working with Nia, Zach, Yusuf and Lewis has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had over the course of this degree so far. Situation Tragedy would not be what it is without each and every one of us bouncing ideas off of each other and being dedicated to our storyline and vision. Originally we were set on doing 2 episodes, and if I were the one to make all the decisions on my own, I wouldn’t think of linking them together to one episode like in the Brass Eye example we watched. However, Zach suggested this and it turned out to be a really effective idea in practise that I’m really glad we ended up doing. We did realise that ‘episode 2’ was basically third act and wouldn’t make sense as a whole episode. I do think the biggest difficulty we had as a group was stubbornness with the editing stage. We all had agreed upon most things before and during filming, but this was where we all had a few disagreements (although things never got heated) about the importance of different things and how they were portrayed in the final cut.

Overall, my experience in this studio has been unforgettable. I’ve met and worked with a lot of different people and have grown much more comfortable with pre-production and production. I’m so proud of Situation Tragedy and I can’t wait for people to watch it.

References:

• Warren, C. & McGraw, A.P. (2015), “Benign Violation TheoryLinks to an external site.” in Attardo, S. (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, Los Angeles: SAGE Reference.
• Meikle, G. (2012), “‘Find Out Exactly What to Think—Next!’: Chris Morris, Brass Eye, and Journalistic AuthorityLinks to an external site.“, Popular Communication, 10(1–2), pp. 14–26.
• Wallace, R., 2018. Mockumentary comedy: Performing authenticity. Springer.