Now I was absent for the concoction of the idea for this sketch, and Jaden graciously volunteered to do the edit, so I put my focus somewhere else for this skit: the camera work.
My main issue with my some of my previous skits had been the camera work and quality. As I have mentioned previously, it wasn’t particularly my focus in this class and I wanted to try and nail the concepts before sacrificing them at the mercy of technical proficiency. This however provided me an opportunity to be a bit more strict with it.
I think I did a decent job. It was my second time ever using this camera (the first being only 2 weeks prior), so there was some finagling involved. Some shots are now actually under-exposed on reflection, but overall the quality was much better. I actually thought I did a pretty good job of camera-tracking and providing the aesthetics of an action film. As the task was genre-hybridisation, I was eager to make it look as close to an action film as possible. Lots of stylised shots that put pieces of the action together (though we probably didn’t have enough action to do a lot of jump-cutting), lots of handheld shots, and small bits of camera movement (while staying centred on the character).
I think it was difficult to not blur the lines of hybridisation and parody with the task (especially for a few minutes sketch), but that seemed to come with the nature of the task. Examples such as American Movie (1999), which gain a lot of its humour through character and personification, have a lot more time to flesh out something to subvert and make funny. Gag/more traditional comedy-style humour relies on concepts such as Benign Violation (Warren & McGraw), that don’t need as much set-up because they revolve around several fundamentals of our previous worldly understanding. American Movie is funny because we feel for the characters presented, and their unorthodox ways of filmmaking and expressing their passion come off as humourous. This isn’t to say it’s impossible or a necessity to have, the idea is that the humour co-exists with its original genre, but like in the case of our skit, I think we hybridised and parodied to some extent, and I think that’s provided me with a new insight: to hybridise comedy into your pieces, you probably need to be able to establish some level of foundation with the genre, story and characters to then also be able to set up lines or insights to make the humourous moments stand out.
References:
Smith, C (director) (1999) American Movie [motion picture], Sony Pictures Classics, United States.
Warren, C. & McGraw, A.P. (2015), “Benign Violation.” in Attardo, S. (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, Los Angeles: SAGE Reference.