Semester 1 2024 has officially wrapped up and as it has flown past, it holds its specialities amongst not only my class, but the whole media cohort in their dramatic and inspiring pieces in a short amount of time. In this semester, my studio was held under Bradley Dixon in Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre, where we learnt many comedic techniques to obtain laughter, guidance in story building narratives, meeting new people and working with them to create something incredible and overall, a fun, hilarious experience like no other.

After classes finished at the start of June, my studio’s screening was exhibited under the ‘And Scene Film Festival’ in the capitol theatre and it was just very cool to see. Wouldn’t it be insane for a film you’ve been working on for several weeks amongst hours amongst hard work, and we get to experience it in a historic cinema, it was very amusing to see not only my groups work but everybody else too. I hope that my screened work in ‘Trip Up’ not only presented laughter to the crowd but also represented the key aspects of what the studio is referring too but also what we believed was so special about it. I think that my groups work was cinematically so unique thanks to K’s brilliance in his cinematography, i wanted everyone’s costumes to prove they had meaning to define their character. For example, my character, Kevin, wears all black and white in the middle with his singlet, he is an outcast compared to everyone else, he is dressed completely different like his personality, expressing darkness and weirdness. This is what the studio is all about, expressing meanings of comedy that are not so apparent to the genre, its more than a genre, there are meanings behind the teaching of it and it goes out of the norm and its unpredictable, its surprising.

If my group was to continue working on our piece, it would be a much more refined, clean cut film. If we had a little more time, the editing would not be rushed, our title card could look a little more colourful, we could experiment with colour a little bit more, especially the tunnel scene, we were all big fans of ‘giallo’ type settings but we just ran out of time to refine it. I think we could promote this piece into a film festival, i think maybe one thing i would change is the idea of maybe shooting a little bit more, just to make the story  flow, giving the characters more realism, experimenting with visual comedy a little bit more, i would happily walk into the ocean again, fully clothed.

In my studio, there were standouts across the board, not one disappointed, we all worked extremely hard and we all got it on point which really surprised me but i knew we were all hard workers and it was really a fun passion to work on a comedic set. I think that ‘Operation: Superstar’ addressed the key ideas of the studio greatly due to their genre hybridisation. Its not always about normal comedies, they can have hidden meanings, they don’t even need to be comedic, this group worked so well because they implemented this coming of age effect in their narrative that disguised its comedic sides with this genre and every time a little gag came in, it outclassed the narrative to make it flow so much better which is why comedy is so powerful. Another groups work that stuck with me was ‘Situation Tragedy’, another hybridisation. This group was so unique because it took a serious situation into a satire. They created a show inside of a show and the ability to make a true crime a true laughter was so amusing to me because nobody was expecting to go the route it did.  This is why it was so different and how each character had their moment to shine was really layered and powerful.

A different studio that stood with me was ‘Visual Blueprint’. This studio follows the art of film symmetry and i found it very interesting to watch not by force but by curiosity because i wanted to see what these guys made and how they followed their class. One work that stood out to me was ‘3 Strikes’. I found that i was not only in a Wes Anderson movie which centre framing but each shot had something so unique about it, it was so satisfying to watch. The colour grading was very stylistic with colour and shadows as well and i could tell everyone involved had a lot of fun making this look as good as it could be. I found it also very interesting how at the start of the piece, it hooked me in and felt so different as each shot went on but followed one principle: Symmetry.

Weeks 7-11 + Essay Links:

Week 7 Reflection

Week 8 Comedy Reflection

Week 9 Reflection Comedy

Week 10 Comedy Reflection

Week 11 Comedy Reflection

Week 12 Final Reflection

Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/952204522

Throughout twelve very quick weeks as a class and our own research, we have discussed comedy in all aspects. Through navigating genre, mode and then experimenting with these theories and now creating a media artefact, we are now hopefully called comedic geniuses. The ‘Trip Up’ follows the team of Angus, K, Saskia, Ben and myself as we dissect the comedy genre to bring something that we think is original, hilarious and cinematic in 15 minutes.

I believe that our artefact engages with the audience and comes back to what we learnt in the studio throughout this semester in many ways. We wanted to plant incongruity all over our piece and i believe we did. Incongruity is when “humour is unpredictable and which involves the juxtaposition of opposing ideas, thoughts or actions will then generate mirth.” (Martin, pg 61, 2022)meaning that we wanted to create laughter by shocking our audience. I believe we achieved this through the character of Kevin, hes a confident, unlikable and weird character at the start and then becomes the sort of relief of an arc that changes his whole personality to try become friends with the boys whilst ending up in the ocean alone. Continuing on with incongruity, we thought it was powerful because when we use it its humorous because it is “an intellectual reaction to something that is unexpected,  illogical or inappropriate in some other way” (Clayton, 2020), we can see this through the green screen scenes, the boys are travelling through random occurrences in the world through this drug, its funny because we are doing random things each time, sharpening each time the comedy.

Looking back from the start of the semester, we have come a long way. Personally, i believe that i have learnt so many new things this semester about one of the most important genres and even beyond the genre in comedy. A very important thing that stuck with me throughout the semester was taken back from Joe Toplyn’s reading about writing comedy for late night tv. He gave us nine steps to creating a story sketch with characters and ways to flow it. My group took these steps to enhance our artefact with especially step one that has stuck with me. “think of a comic character with two or three exaggerated traits” (Toplyn, 2014). We used this with Kevin, physically and through speech, his costume proposes him as a sort of douche, he thinks hes better than everyone, fakes experience, lies and is flat out weird with his random theories he just boats out. His real personality is flowed through the drug he pretends hes taken before but has obviously never done drugs before.

Let’s say if we got to keep working on this artefact, it would be more experimental with more nonsense going on in a good way of course. I think in the short amount of time we had we accomplished what we wanted to do and i was very happy about it. I think i myself wanted to do various things including using the ocean, a tunnel, willy Wonka’s song in the tunnel and random other things and we got to do them in a way i was satisfied. I think as a group, we wanted to experiment with the camera itself a little more. We wanted to make the camera move in a way that is hypnotising. Id also like to refine our colouring a little more, i enjoy ‘giallo’ type backgrounds and I’m glad the tunnel was coloured and we can take advantage of that which was very cool to colour grade with. I think if we had a little more time it would be a sharper piece. On the last day of filming we had to rush back to the city to bring the equipment to the shop as our booking was ending, this stopped our flow and kind of stressed us out with time which was not our aim. Although time was a problem, we overcame this and was still very excited and happy with what we got.

Speaking now on collaboration, my team was like no other. Over the whole semester, i worked with various people with different comedic receptions and it was fun to experiment and learn new abilities with everyone. I would say my final group with K, Angus, Saskia and Ben was my most powerful. Each one of us brought something to the table and when we were together writing, it would keep us going and bounce off one another to make a new joke. As Simons states when people laugh, they laugh because they “hear something surprising, something familiar, …because they’re uncomfortable…frightened…because they felt very alone for a long time and now they don’t” (Simons,  2023) i think that we saw this and we implemented it in our script. We wanted to make something stand out familiar with our audience, we wanted to bring our experiences with people we knew and what people go through and work on it to create characters. A big example of this was the urination monologue at the end of the film. Going back to the group, whether it was having our own equipment, eager to edit, eager to use their house, eager to experiment, eager to test the boundaries and improvisation, my group followed through and helped each other create a masterpiece in my eyes and i am forever thankful i chose to be with these people in this studio. There are many other things that i have definitely forgotten but still grateful to be involved in this team and class.

References:

-Martin, G.N. (2022) The psychology of comedy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

-Simons, S. (2023) 6 Small Essays About Comedy, Humorism. Available at: https://www.humorism.xyz/six-small-essays-about-comedy/ (Accessed: May 2024).

-Toplyn, J. (2014) ‘Story Sketches’, in Comedy writing for late-night tv : how to write monologue jokes, desk pieces, sketches, parodies, audience pieces, remotes, and other short-form comedy . Rye, New York, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 221–238.

-Clayton, A. (2020) Funny how?: Sketch comedy and the art of humor. State University of New York Press.

This week was a real eye opener for my group, it many ways it was a very important and successful week too. On Monday’s class we watched on as each group proposed their idea to our two guests who were so cool to have and to listen to one after another for the whole class. Of course as we sat through group after group hearing everyone’s very unique and hilarious ideas, our fate was over and we were last of course. My group’s presentation was different to anyone else’s, we as a group are very hands on, we don’t really work in a planned presentation which sounds weird but i think we work better thinking off one another rather than just showing off a PowerPoint, our idea is very strong and very passionate to us all and we show this all off through our group chat, class time and our scriptwriting. The feedback we were given was very helpful, we were in a bit of a writers block where we didn’t really know where to go from a specific part which was the beach scene where the boys reach a hard point in the journey where they have almost given up in finding Millie Bobby, basically the climax of the film, which was the most important to progress the characters. The help we got was refreshing, the main thing i took away was to write natural, no need to squeeze every joke in existence in, it will obviously come naturally and that is what happened on Wednesday. On Wednesday we completed the script and i was very happy and amused by my groups work to go forth and dive into the deep end and head on the right track of success. I would say my favourite part of this was sort of looking back at cinema, we all felt like we were brainstorming cinematic moments like we were George Lucas, Brain De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola the way we were talking about old cinema and how we can possibly, through camera movement, bring these moments back into our piece. A hilarious and really cool looking idea we have and are experimenting with is recreating one of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka nursery rhyme where the children and him are on the boat and head into the tunnel, everything starts to freak out.

Willy Wonka Tunnel Song

We will use this when my character Kevin freaks out and is put into a peer pressured scenario where he basically has to ‘walk the plank’ into a strange tunnel and to calm himself down psychotically sings this and freaks his acquaintances out, this will look very cool with different colours as well which we are hoping for.

As another week goes past, another point of progress comes through into my groups project. I would say that this week was a fun, chemistry building week for my group. We are all starting to really click and i hope that this chemistry grows into our experimentation of what we can make together. This week we went into different heights, Through Angus, we created a vomit script in which has been refined throughout the week together to promote our thinking and the blank spaces we struggled with. I think the best part of our group is improvising, this week we thought of many ideas on the spot which not only intrigued one of us but then through explanation helped the whole story and the group to create groundwork for the narrative. I think another thing this week i discovered was that all of us watch movies a lot and that we have used this as an advantage to give each other references of inspiration that we can either use or watch that will help us grow further in execution. Towards the end of the week we have adapted the script into almost fully completed, we have got inspirations for locations that work with the script in which we discussed from the start of the week to the end. I myself would like to work on character outlines, costuming and writing too as i feel that yes we are all working together, i need to show that i can help more as well which i am very excited to experiment with. What I am looking at in my research is colour coordination with characters and feelings and the colour theory which means that specific colours refer to specific emotional qualities that will respond to the audience. Yes we are creating a straight out comedy, but we want to cinematically shock our audience, and that’s what i am hoping for.

Here is an example of what i am looking at so far:

https://www.filmd.co.uk/articles/what-is-colour-theory-in-film-how-it-can-transform-your-storytelling/

I will then eventually create a document showcasing each character, have their habits, draw them to life through their personality and go from there.

Week 8 has been a very quick week in time and also in progress of our piece. Although it’s still the start of the project, i have very high hopes for our idea and our progress is helping us through to think this way. The best part of this so far is that everyone is on the same level and each of us are coming up with ideas to either aid characters, narrative, cinematography and just random ideas that make us all laugh which is the point of what we are doing. On Mondays class we presented a short pitch of the early stages of the idea we had and we were very surprised that people outside of our group were amused by our idea which is a very good sign, after we presented our idea we went back and started to organise what our storyline would roughly look like, we also watched various videos together to give our group inspiration, an example of this was an inspiration from Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Danny DeVito’s character is tripping out he thinks hes stuck in a bathroom and with the help of a fisheye lens it shows his psychotic side which was huge for us. On Wednesday’s class we made a lot of progress with our whole idea. We went straight into it thanks to the brainstorm experiment where we named our four characters and promoted them all with distinct qualities which made them themselves. These qualities of the characters are very special and all carry high into our project, one thinks he is in a documentary, one is a very arrogant, confident liar, one disappears and goes on a unexpected adventure and one who has a regular happy experience. We also experimented with possible storylines where murder is involved but ill leave that to discuss next week if we chose this or not, its very funny. By the end of the week we will have a vomit draft presented through Angus, i will be continuing my research through Peep Show and communicating with the group on possible storylines and next week we will hopefully have a solid story drafted up. Overall this week has been very fun to brainstorm and bounce ideas off one another.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kMjqtrxvd6rAWeUQTuDX38nDuqC_0xd2DBIGBVhNGaY/edit?usp=sharing =Group Agreement & Expectations on the product.

The first week of the group assignment has officially passed and all i can say is i am very excited and amused for the future of the creative, hilarious piece we create together. Although we just started, i feel that each team member in our group provides a sort advantage to our project and as we work together and get to know each-other more, our ideas will help us rise to create what we are aiming for, something very special. At the start we didn’t really have an idea on what we could create but as we got to know what type of comedy we like through youtube videos, tv shows and even some movies that don’t even express comedy, we brainstormed and then kept bouncing off ideas off one another’s thoughts which is a good sign into us creating this short film. We want to create something that takes the piss out of people our age range and sort of a familiarity in our youth class, with this sort of familiarity, we will introduce comedic elements like satire, incongruity and sort of smart comedy to enhance our idea.

Comedy Mood Board:

I enjoy all types of comedy but i would say that the comedy that i like is the comedy that laughs about the scenarios we get in, the familiarity, dark comedy and incongruity, i probably like more stuff too but here are some examples i’m thinking around with my team and what i like. Because we are focusing on sort of comedy within groups of people i thought of these examples + stuff i like:

Theories i would like to experiment with:

-Genre Hybridisation: I like the idea of sort of combining a genre with then providing comedy elements, i feel that it makes it very natural and just how life is, a big example i think personally is The Sopranos, we can go from one very dramatic scene to the funniest thing you’ll ever see. Example Pine Barrens Episode (S3 E11). 

-Satire: I like the idea of showcasing real life scenarios and then dramatising them with comedy, this stuff makes me laugh the most and my group notices this too which is a good sign and opportunity for the future. The best way to make people laugh in my opinion is to remind them of something familiar. Example Carl Barron Standup or any standup performance basically.

Almost Friday TV – Form & Visual Style

These guys have a youtube channel where they make skits about these things that we go through and really mess around with form plus they are really professionally made. One example i like is when you see that one guy at a party who u just want to say goodbye to, the guys use this as groundwork and then turned it into this hypnotised ‘Get Out’ type scenario where the guy is stuck inside held captive by this frat guy which was just so extreme and hilarious.

Peep Show – Form & Visual Style

I chose this for an example because i like how it uses the POV of the camera to become the characters to then communicate what i think is intensity and provides us laughter which makes us feel involved, threatened and to myself it works really well to display comedy even though i am just on season 1. No other show i have seen that does the same as Peep Show.

‘Key and Peele’ -Sketches

I chose these guys because i basically just grew up watching random sketches on youtube from these two. I loved how far they have come and their jokes and sketches really still stick up today and my humour still cracks up with these two. I like the absurdity they get into its too good.

The Inbetweeners –The Gig and the Girlfriend -Episode

I chose this episode because it shows the boys firstly paying for drugs from the school bully in which they actually get given tea and try to smoke it, they eventually get weed at a gig where Simon tries to impress a girl, Jay pretends he is a drug expert, Neil mixes ribena and sleeping pills instead, and Will has a breakdown in front of the whole concert as he is peer pressured into ingesting the drugs. This sort of follows our group idea through different ways people respond to drugs.

Seinfeld –The Contest Episode

I chose this episode because it follows each character and their POV on the contest in which we will try to sort of replicate, each character goes through something different and i think this way is just really funny and works well through how ridiculous it is.

Double checked all the links they should work.

Experiment #1 Parody: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2024/04/05/beyond-a-genre-comedy-studio-assignment-2-parody-reflection/

Experiment #2 Satire: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2024/04/12/comedy-assignment-2-part-2/

Experiment #3 Genre Hybridisation: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2024/04/19/the-divorce-hybridisation-experiment-3-genre-hybridisation/