Milk Run – Beyond a Joke Beyond a Genre from Media Factory on Vimeo.

I hope we showed a unique representation of student life that was relatable to our audience, I think the fish-out-of-water qualities of Max as a protagonist were well emphasized and added to the coming-of-age feeling we were trying to capture. By integrating Harper’s lived experiences of moving to Melbourne, we were able to get a different perspective on things we take for granted living in Melbourne. His unique observations allowed us to comment on the cost-of-living crisis, the issues with furniture at cafes, and more in an understated way, with comedy that isn’t at first immediately apparent. We approached the group project with the aim of hybridizing comedy and a coming-of-age film, a goal which I think we achieved to a degree.

Over the course of the semester, I feel as if my approach to comedy has become if not more sophisticated, easier to describe. I found myself revisiting previous pieces of content that I had found tremendously funny with a new way of looking at how they were able to achieve this effect. The concept of comedy as a mode of production in the creation of a piece of media inspired me to explore the genre of comedy verité, “[that], is comedy for audiences raised on television formats.” (Mills 2004, p.78) having already been familiar with the work of John Wilson and Nathan Fielder. I watched different forms of cinema verité which were produced with a comedic goal in mind, films including Spinal Tap (1984), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968) and web series Hardy Bucks (2007), each blending fiction with reality within the form of documentary style recordings.

These comedies and the approach their creators have taken have each produced vastly different results, but what remains consistent is a goal to subvert, commentate, and give representation to those who are living its source material. In my future projects, where appropriate, I would like to replicate this approach to hybridise various types of media with comedic production methods.

If I were to continue working on this piece, there are a few aspects I would alter. I would like the chance to go through and further refine the sound, adding more SFX and atmos to scenes that lacked dialogue. Furthermore, I feel that there were improvements to the cuts in dialogue scenes I could have made to make them funnier, by altering the pace of Max and Charlie’s delivery and practicing more ‘cutting on the absurd’ (Middleton 2002 p.57).

If I were to modify the result of my groups work it would be to extend and lean further into the character of Charlie. I found that our actor Matt really brought Charlie to life with his portrayal and that Charlie worked well as a “comic character” (Toplyn 2014 p.229), if he were to have a goal and a few more exaggerated characteristics, I could see there being more kitchen cadaver situations to explore in a comedic way. Finally, I would have liked the lighting of scenes to have been better but due to time constraints, we had to colour-correct shots in post-production to achieve cohesive flow of time throughout the piece.

Working to create the piece collaboratively was initially slow, as we each had different comedic styles to amalgamate into a script we were happy with. As we gave up control of the script to Harper and Amy to refine, I found that things began to move faster, being allowed to work in a specific role meant I was able to focus on planning props, locations, and pieces of equipment we needed for the shoot.

Filming collaboratively was similarly easier when roles were defined and stuck to, there was a fair degree of overlap in people’s roles and sometimes there were inconsistent qualities of work being recorded to put together the final piece in the edit. When matching up audio there were often two or three different action calls being made by different people, this made things difficult to sync and I had to use other audio cues such as loud noises or single words to line things up in Premiere, for future projects I will be more vigilant about following protocol when calling action to avoid the time it took to synchronise audio.

Amy’s sound mixing was essential for Milk Run to come together as a final piece as I had little experience working with audio in Premiere and Audition. I learned new ways to work with sound across the Adobe suite including techniques for sound isolation and recovering dialogue from scenes with excessive background noise; these will be essential skills to refine as I progress in my media-making career.

Reference List:
Mills B (2004) Comedy verite: contemporary sitcom form Screen (London), 63–78.
Toplyn J (2014) Story Sketches Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV Twenty Lane Media, pp. 221–238.
Middleton J (2002) Documentary Comedy Media International Australia Incorporating Culture & Policy, 104, 55–66.