In the third week of this journey, i learnt new ideas, new theories and new feedback to inform myself on how i can create new comedic elements in not just visual ways but through dialogue, characters and actions. This weeks focus was on the comic frame. From my learning in class i learnt that the concept of framing refers to the role of context in the construction of meaning which is how normally things would go. By adding comedic elements to this, the contextual cues leading the interpretation of a message is centrally important into what we make symbolic sense to the audience. These frames therefore change where you are, for example, how you talk in a sports setting compared to the classroom or church, you wouldn’t speak like that at that setting. Things are funny because they are communicated as a comedy, this is the comic frame, its communicated to us that it is funny, we don’t take it serious because we know we are expecting something with a gag. Also in this weeks readings i was well informed how to prepare for the building of my sketch of the week. Through Toplyn’s reading, he gave us 9 steps in order to create a story sketch. A story sketch is basically a normal beginning middle ending story but with various guidelines to perfect it. A big guideline he makes which is his first is to “Think of a comic character with two or three exaggerated traits” (Toplyn, 2014) which this first guideline helped the whole class just from creating a character to develop their whole piece and mood of their sketch. For my own sketch, i helped gain feedback before filming my idea from the classmates, i feel that every idea i gain is very specific, my classmates told me to keep it simple in which i did, i kept this feedback in mind throughout my piece due to the time constraints and get straight to the point, through the help of my classmates we worked together to find new ideas to help us all gain confidence. Furthermore, this weeks artefact was the most interesting, challenging and fun at the same time as we had to watch out for time but introduce dialogue and story to the humour from other weeks so we had to try harder to get the humour moving. I wanted to make a curveball with the character i made to be unbelievable but mess with the characters too.

https://vimeo.com/926225233?share=copy

References:

Toplyn, J. (2014) Comedy writing for late-night TV: How to write monologue jokes, desk pieces, sketches, parodies, audience pieces, remotes, and other short-form comedy. Rye, NY: Twenty Lane Media, LLC.

In the second week of the comedy studio, we learnt a new theory, something different to the past theory we learnt and this one has got me thinking very hard for my sketch. In this week i learnt about Benign Violation and Relief comedy alongside silent comedy. These theories of humour were developed into my own piece this week but i focused more on the violation and linking silent comedy with using visual comedy instead of using vocal language to deliver the punchline, i limited the amount of talking to flow it better. First of all, Benign Violation theory is when humour occurs whilst a circumstance is appraised as a violation, something that is not normal,  the circumstance is appraised as benign(gentle) and both of these perceptions work together to deliver the punchline. The way i look at Benign violation theory is through a Venn diagram, on the left side, Benign, its safe, acceptable, on the right side we have violation, it breaks the norms and rules and in the middle we have the two together withheld by puns, slapstick, sarcasm, dirty jokes and more. Relief comedy is basically when a character reliefs the audience from tension in a serious situation. This could be seen in our class when we watched the first episode of Mr. Bean, we see him in an exam a very serious and stressful time, and causing a ruckus with visual comedy, not even speaking and he makes us laugh, this could be applied due to his facial abilities, props and performance. Going back to visual comedy, this concept is heavily connected to silent comedy. This type of comedy was very popular during the start of cinema, with comedic actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In class we watched Buster Keaton’s film ‘The High Sign’ from 1921, a movie over 100 years old still cracked up the class. With the use of facial expressions, over the top dramatic responses, slapstick and stunts, silent comedy was very powerful. In my media artefact i tried to respond to these theories by linking them together to create something funny. My idea was to have a witty cocky character walk the streets then bump into a character who was ultimately blind and him not realise it and all this happening from a still character, no close ups at all to emphasis the genre. From week 2 we enlisted in feedback from our peers, i used this hugely as when i was thinking of an idea, my peers told me to think simple not hard, and this is exactly what i did, and i think it worked.

I Didn’t See You There

In the first week of ‘Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre’ i have learnt quite a lot. So far this has been quite an exciting first week out of all my studios i have done previously, maybe its because everyone in class just laughs or maybe its just naturally a different change. In the first week i learnt many new abilities to enhance my knowledge on the styles of comedy and various theories  with the help of the readings and incorporated these into my artefact. As i learnt, people laugh when “they hear something surprising…something familiar” (Simons, 2023). I used this idea in my artefact to surprise the audience with the familiarity of our generation and joking about the hilarious absurdity that people detail about one another in a dating atmosphere. My understanding so far of the comedy form is to obviously make people laugh, but do so in a way with a sort of plan in mind, whether its because its relatable or it just gives them a kick to pause from the world. As i learnt through class discussion and Audissino’s reading, there are many types of comedic theories that are not only unique but hold large value and history towards one another. Superiority theory which is based upon ancient Greek figures explaining that the centre of humour should focus on feelings of superiority. Relief theory, which focuses on the 20th century world of thinking involving Freud and psychoanalysis and how the brain permits into something being funny. Benign violation theory which is the humour that is currently with us in this century this is a special theory as it can add to things that are not funny actually making the audience laugh. Finally Incongruity theory which is the theory that focuses on the work we focused upon this week. Incongruity means basically ‘out of place’, whether this is like physically or just something that does not belong or is just flat out absurd in reality. This use of out of the ordinary is following my work i created. With the use of repetition, i felt that by doing the slightly same thing would help categorize the piece with comedy and as it drags on for the rest, it would become funnier. In my sketch, i created the idea of showcasing the phenomenon going on in social media since the last couple years of mostly serious people calling out peoples ‘icks’ which are basically turn offs for who they potentially will date (deal breakers). The thing about ‘icks’ are they are not really normal they are oddly specific, which i wanted to spin and play on by how they are so specific they are out of place. The reason i chose this week to showcase this idea was because these turn off’s are so surprising because you think how would someone even be thinking in their heads that these actions made by another person is affecting them so badly that they cannot do it anymore and have to run while they can, its hilarious.

References:

Simons, S. (2023) 6 Small essays about Comedy, Humorism. (Accessed: 07 March 2024).

Audissino, E. (2023) ‘From Dionysia to Hollywood: An Introduction to Comedy’s Long (and Bumpy) Road’, in The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. 1st edn. Springer International Publishing AG, pp. 3–23. (Accessed: 07 March 2024)

Ickongruity.

In my studios exhibition, apart from my own team, it was a really fun and excellent display of how far each of the groups came and how much we achieved in a small amount of time. When looking at the website and other students insights, i was really amused by a number of them. A big one that was amusing to me was Finley’s reflection. Finley’s group created a zombie gory film and exposed the traumatic teenage life of females embarking on both of these journeys. To me, Finley’s idea was really unique and i really was intrigued to know all the double meanings and the themes she wanted to play at as it’s a zombie apocalypse and it goes into the ideas of diet culture in which the symbolism to me is really ironic to understand and realise how this problem of the stereotypical way of life is hard for people to grow out of and with a zombie apocalypse, it twists the meaning into cannibalism which is really smart. Another reflection that stood out to me was Isabella’s reflection. In her reflection she stated that she felt really overwhelmed with the amount of importance sound design does in order to make a good movie and as i watched over the editing of the film every session, i realised how hard and how significant it is to get these sounds especially for this genre, its literally the main focus and the process to find the exact sound that can fit to somewhat scare the audience is harder than it sounds. Another thing that stood out to me was her ending, she stated that ‘there’s perfection in the process’ and that at the start you might think its unachievable but it will gradually start to create a body and that exactly how our group felt when editing, we felt like this wouldn’t make sense or whatever but scene by scene we could see it gradually growing. As i went through different studios websites, i looked into film form and i found a piece that was really amusing and heartfelt to myself. Love and longing is a story by Zach Coyne which follows himself hearing from people as he has a sign out and gets hugs from people and they share stories about people who they miss. His story at the start and throughout is very interesting and made me realise that we shouldn’t take people for granted and we need to express gratitude amongst people, it made me sad that those people were sitting together and they were both on their phones, his piece was brilliant how all those people came up to him and expressed their stories. Another in that same studio that i was amused from was Things that bother me which was made by Emily Cox. This short film/documentary is about her 93 year old grandmother which she explains her things that constantly give her grievance. This in particular stood out to me because it felt so intense and it made me feel that i knew this lady really well just from this short 9 minutes. I am always fond of stories and Emily’s way of telling her story is experimental in its own way with the help of messages her grandmother wrote then she talks about it then it implements archival footage too which was really amusing to watch, her house was really nostalgic and very close to home which made it extra special alongside the real stories.

Post 1: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2023/10/16/assignment-4-post-1-pre-production/

Post 2: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2023/10/16/assignment-4-post-2-production/

Post 3: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2023/10/16/assignment-4-pos…-post-production/

Post 4: https://www.mediafactory.org.au/giorgiocurcio/2023/10/16/assignment-4-pos…final-reflection/

Link to film via vimeo:

Production File:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WXEoPsyCCIlmSDrIGs_o7eIPZqFKNGKm?usp=sharing

To think that this journey is already over is very surprising, it felt like yesterday when we sorted ourselves into our groups and started this same journey. I feel that my role as assistant director, production manager and art director for Jaz’s ‘The Newsroom’ was an experience like no other and i’m extremely glad i chose to join this particular group. I felt that i did as much as i could in this short amount of time and i am really proud for how myself and more importantly each and every members and their contribution to our short film, you’d think that just cause this is an assignment, we wont take it seriously, but throughout the amount of time outside of class we worked around this short film, our passion and gratitude expresses it. I think the final work of our short film communicates with the class studio very well as its everything it promises. Post horror for myself is very easy to spot, in my eyes it’s a horrific film and holds elements of a societal commentary of some sort and uses this commentary to make it scary, whether its racism, grief or anything that is personal to the audience, in our case its misogyny. Our short film clearly exposes ideas of workplace bullying, misogyny,  trauma and many more elements to prove the point that this film is overall a post horror story that entangles these ideas together to create an atmosphere in this world that could be hidden in the shadows(misogynistic parts of course). Le’ts say if we could do this all again and i could change some things i would only change a little bit. Firstly, i would like more time between when we were assigned and when the due date was, i felt if we had more time, we could have gotten better actors even though all of ours were beautiful but i feel if we had more time we could experiment with many more places involving many more horrific people. Also, another thing i would change would be adding a microphone onto the camera instead of only relying on the boom mic, if we did this in our production, it would help us edit smoother, quicker and efficiently as we could easily spot the two audios and sync them together rather than using the camera footage and slowly trying to find and sync the audio per millisecond at a time. One more thing that i would do differently would be prepare and adapt the set a bit more than i did, i felt that yes i did as much as i could but i obviously could’ve put more effort to be more unique into what i think a news set could look like or a kitchen could look like or an alleyway could look like, i feel that i had so much freedom that i could’ve made it a visually pleasing and scary feeling but i did not deliver as much as i could’ve.  I think there are many strengths and weaknesses that hold our group together for our final film and there are more strengths thankfully. I think our main strengths involve being able to communicate, it does sound obvious and silly but we were like nonstop chatting and constantly helping one another by providing insight and any questions that were needed were instantly answered. Another strength we had was our time on set, each day we finished almost two hours early every time, whether it was just our actors or just luck, our smooth ability to move from scene to scene whilst providing so much coverage was very good to see. I think the weaknesses of our finished film were limited, but i think a big one was our rush for time in post production, each couple of days we were running to the edit suites, providing our own personal time into editing this long formula of a film even though it was ten minutes, it felt like a three hour never ending story, If we had more time i know we wouldn’t feel rushed and our edits could be smoother with the addition of various aspects like score to be improved, sounds to be added and colour grading to symbolically provide meaning as well.

As pre production was quickly finished, then likewise production wrapped, we moved quickly along the trail to the editing suites into post production. My role as production manager and assistant director was actually pretty important and more surprising than i realised. Yes, i have taken a slight break on the amount of work i have been doing, but, there is still so many things to be done which i needed to do. Firstly, as soon as production wrapped, i emailed each and every actor we used in the creation of our production and sent them thank you messages expressing our gratitude and a ‘we hope to see you soon to celebrate the release’ which each actor loved the messages too. Many things that i got up to in post production were watching the editor in the suites alongside my director, i felt that with the help of an extra person sometimes around could lead to more ideas that could creatively provide our narrative with more post horrific elements, in which it did work. An example of this was with the first shot of the entire film, my idea of a kettle boiling off camera and the shot of a close up could be used instead of a full body shot and a mix of different shots that did not really sync properly worked in our favour to implement a post horror short film. I think that the overall challenges i had as my role were different to others, for the director, this is her idea, this is her vision and i needed to work with her to create what i felt could work in ways that could satisfy her, in which you could say was challenging but for my group, this was not at all. I think a big challenge for myself was to be confident, i felt at the start of my journey, i was really nervous and was not really sure all the time what i was doing but while i learnt this new environment, i kind of felt special and i enjoyed producing this thing and made me feel like i was protecting, feeding and growing up this little baby that is ‘The News Room’.

Production for ‘The Newsroom’ was a sort of fever dream for myself and the crew. We filmed over three days and it went very smoothly and efficiently. We planned each day in different shooting orders not following the scripted formula, we filmed the last part of the film last which was in the news studio which was filmed in Studio D of RMIT which was really cool to do. For my position, i decorated the set with a news wear atmosphere which involved the prop room where we acquired a big news desk with a Television below it and many other environmental changes. Along with the set, lighting was very fun to experiment with, the studio was very heavy with lights all around the ceiling, one on each corner in which we adjusted to discover what feeling we were going for each scene/shot. One challenge was definitely as it was the first day, i was not really used to having this much authority, of  course i took some time but then i got really used to this workplace, i was talking to the actors and was providing insight on what we can improve on, of course i messed up with costuming as one day i accidentally left it at home, thankfully, i don’t live far and ran back and forth and got back to the shoot on time for the actor. The other days also ran smoothly as we finished earlier hours than expected which worked for us to be more confident in the shots we wanted and the planning/break we could leverage with. Reflecting on my role as assistant director, i took charge of the clapper throughout the whole production which meant i was close to the set, observing and directing where the cast should go alongside Jaz. I remember a couple things that stuck with me which included day 2 in the kitchen scene, the script stated that Richard goes up to Sarah, i had an idea that to make her uncomfortable and fit the feeling of misogyny, he goes up to her and she backs off, implying a sort of sexual workplace with the men against women. Also for the final day, we needed b-roll footage for the flashback scenes of James’ death and i took the courage of holding the camera and thinking of any shots that could encourage uncomfortable settings in which i chose a Dutch angle which i was really proud of.

When you think of pre production, you think, oh its just a long process where nothing happens and planning is the overall goal of it, but, its so much more. When i was assigned role of Production manager and Assistant Director (Art direction),  i didn’t really get what i was doing, i didn’t know that this was a reality, i didn’t know how important i really was. From the very get-go of joining my group, i was really excited as i thought that Jaz (director)’s idea  was really powerful and could be really fun and interesting to film. A week into the group i felt the exact opposite as what i was feeling, i felt excited, i felt creative and i felt important. With the role of production manager, I had to do a lot of things in the pre production phase which were challenging to me as this was my first ever completed short film. With this role i was in charge of casting, shooting schedule, call sheets, props/costuming, meetings and catering. I think the choices i myself made were very big due to Jaz providing myself to be flexible with what i wanted. With the catering, a big challenge i had was what i should actually get, luckily for scheduled various meetings with my cast and crew, i found out if anyone had any dietary requirements which made my life easier in acquiring food for everyone, which the food was really well received. For the tone/style for the short film, i was given clearance on the set which provided myself opportunity to create my own narrative with the objects of the film whether it was costuming or various props on set. With the props, especially for Sarah and Richard, i wanted to colour code them for the individual and how they can be feeling, Sarah’s mug is pinkish red and white which i wanted to resemble a sort of guilty feeling with the red and the white could resemble innocence. For Richards mug which was blueish it represents males and the stereotypical male which we wanted to represent in his character. Another thing in pre production that really gelled us together was the constant communication and meetings we held as a team, you’d think that these meetings would be awkward as none of us really knew each other a lot except for myself and Ben, but we really all got along really well and wanted to make a piece as passionately powerful as we were imagining it, these meeting showed it.

Post Horror Assignment #2

s3944683@student.rmit.edu.au

‘You Were Closed When I Needed You’

Research Statement:

For this assignment, i created a world full of trauma, confusion, and deception in a way to horrify my audience. My short film is called ‘You Were Closed When I Needed You’ and follows the deceptions and tragedy of mental health and the trauma of dealing with it in a post horror way. The research i undertook to demonstrate and create this film were interesting to find out. In my research, my main priority was to inspire myself into these dark themes and scenarios but did not want to make it like a classical horror film, i wanted it to be dialogue heavy to confuse the audience even more. My research for this creation were three films that took my interest highly, these were ‘Shutter Island’ (2010) which involved the flipping of the antagonist victim into the perpetrator of the crime scenario and just the total mind breaking it did for myself i had to explore this idea of insanity in characters. Another film that was ground-breaking for my research was the 2020 film ‘The Father’ which show’s Anthony Hopkins character Anthony losing his mind and the audience with dementia, and it shifted my viewing into being so invested and then confused just like the character experiencing this breakdown in reality. Another film that brought the stalking scenarios into my film was definitely Hush (2016) it follows stalker stalking a deaf woman and it just gets really intense and he’s always in the background and that’s what i wanted to replicate the most. Moving away from just films, screenplays that influenced me that i researched upon were various post-horror films including ‘The Babadook’ written by Jennifer Kent, i feel like the way she writes helped me get words onto my page, her usage of technical elements made me feel comfortable writing. Another screenplay that helped me was John Krasinski’s ‘A Quiet Place’, its mysterious creatures that are described by Krasinski made me wonder how i could trick the audience into creating mysteries with the stalker. The tone of my script is although made to be dark and have the use of shadows, i was picturing it in my head as a sort of ‘giallo’ Dario Argento film while i was writing, i was trying to be artistic with the garage from mad max and the way it sort of hypnotises you. A final inspiration for my script was definitely The Sopranos, not in the mafia way but the psychologist way, the relationship between the patient and the professional is just interesting and the dreaming sequences Tony has in his coma just reminded me of what i was writing.

Reflection:

Reflecting on my piece, this script came to me because i wanted to haunt my audience, not in a scary classic way but just a mind-bending way. When i was writing my piece i kept thinking of stereotypical horror films and how i need to go as far away as possible while i was writing, i found myself deleting a lot of things and replacing them with post horror elements in order to make my piece stand out. The process of my idea was quite excessive, i have had many experiences with mental health struggles and seeing these in action like dementia through various people, i realised how scary it actually is from their point of view and the person viewing it, it made me realise that i don’t think that it’s really been explored and i could make this without really copying anything word for word, yes there’s clear inspiration from other sources, but not entirely. I think a big challenge i had when i was writing was how to make it scary. I feel that yes i am making a horror script, i should know how to make it scary, but i struggled heaps into making it original, terrifying, and realistic. I think an epiphany i had whilst writing was the ending, i was sleeping and i just woke up sort of cause i had this thought in my head into how to end it and i wrote it down and i was really happy with what i did cause i was half asleep and it just popped into my mind. I wanted an obscure ambiguous ending and I’m glad i went with it instead of a death ending or a good ending, the reader can decide what happens next, is she faking it? is she confused? did she kill her husband? I wanted to leave the audience with questions and i hope i, did no matter what about.

One Drive link to script:

Post Horror Script