Now that my final work has been completed and I have had time to look back over at everything throughout the semester, I can see how my idea of comedy has greatly shifted. In the beginning, I struggled to even imagine how I would be able to produce something funny that isn’t solely comedic. During the first weeks of the semester when working on short sketches, I thought that is all I would be able to achieve throughout the process of writing, filming and editing Operation Super-Star. I now understand how I am able to apply the comic frame to any genre or narrative situation.

I believe that this is why Operation Super-Star does so well as a film for this media studio (Beyond a Joke, Beyond the Genre). While our film is comedic in nature it still goes through character/narrative arcs and a thematic, mood-shifting storyline. The humour in this film is not just found in jokes that are told verbally through dialogue or done visually through the actor’s performance of their characters. While that still stands true it works similarly to how comedy works in a sitcom, being that the humour is found in the narrative situations, (Butler, J.G. 2020). These situations occur through moments of absurdity: such as a giant rat talking to the two boys and incongruity: like a rat-tail hairstyle being an actual rat’s tail, within the film. However, this absurdity works primarily for the audience, as even though the boys are first shocked by the Ratman the scene continues as if he was a normal person to them, while the audience sees a freakishly large rodent, (Palmer J. 1987).

The question of what I would do if I were to keep working on it is a hard question for this film. I’m used to the past list of details of the film that I think need improvement but I cannot for Operation Super-Star. To me it is the best thing I have had the opportunity of working on and it to me is perfect. It might be because of how dedicated we all were to it, adding a lot of our own time, money and resources to make it work, but I believe that other people will see the same magic in the film that we do. Time was not a constraint for us, but rather a challenge. This is because we started from the very beginning giving this film a lot of time to do achieve the goals that we wanted to achieve (still within the reason of 3 weeks). However, I do think that the ideas of the film are funny enough to be turned into a series, which was also an idea given by a panellist at our film’s pitch. I think that it would work as a sitcom because the two main characters already have a constant “narrative problematic” which is them wanting to be DJs (Butler, J.G. 2020).

Throughout the production, we came through various challenges but we all as a group knew what we wanted to achieve. I think a big part of this was establishing a contract with each other before we began any work. This meant that everyone was able to say what they wanted out of this and that we were all on the same page and understood the type of commitment we would have to it.

My group all collaborated very well together I believe. While I think that part of this is due to our pre-established connection with each other, a lot of it is still thanks to the certain measures we took as a group. We also at an early stage established that everyone in the group no matter the role has creative input into the film. I think that whenever someone is directing something it is very easy to get into a mindset of “my way or the highway”, and not only does this miss out on many potentially great ideas, but it also demoralises the crew. It makes people feel like they are only there to help someone else’s vision come true – this then takes away their investment from the film and doesn’t give them a reason to work to the best of their abilities, (Hodge C. 1984). Together we all knew that the film was going to take a lot of effort to make and that our jobs will have to be divided as fairly as we can. Finding the right balance between doing your own job successfully and stepping out of your role to help others is a hard balance to find but I believe that when it is done group work becomes a lot less stressful and a lot more can be achieved together. 

Overall I am very happy with how Operation Super-Star came out and I feel like I have learned a lot from this studio. Going from struggling to come up with one funny joke for a minute-long sketch in the early weeks to now having produced a 22-minute-long short film that I believe is funny, really makes me feel like I have come a long way and achieved a lot in this studio.