One key concern of our studio “Beyond a Joke, Beyond a genre”, was exploring the way comedy can operate as a genre or mode, both as it is and hybridised, and how comedy can be embedded into genres that aren’t necessarily classified as “funny”. Through that, as a class we aimed to investigate what exactly it was that made people laugh. Our group’s short film Operation Super-Star explored this idea through implementing a combination of elements, such as utilising incongruity as a mode, and combining comedy with the Coming of Age genre, in order to explore the friendship, and personalities of the two main characters, Harry and Fergie. Through this, we aimed to engage our audience via the way we implemented said incongruity, which was conveyed through absurdist humour, such as within our secondary characters and dialogue, whilst also maintaining a simple story about the barriers of friendship and commentary on social hierarchy. Our group had the wonderful opportunity of having our film be screened on opening night at the Capital Theatre, meaning that we had a much bigger audience than anticipated. Though I believe that we were able to somewhat engage our audience in the way that we intended, specifically through moments of dialogue, such as when the Rat Man says “Ya mum” and he laughs and scatters away from the boys after giving them rats-tails. I felt like this moment within our film received the most laughs, which was honestly unexpected.
If I were to continue to work on our film with the intention of entering it into a festival, I would spend more time fixing and modifying the audio. I think it was good to watch the film in an environment other than the editing suite, as I was able to notice areas where the audio may need improving, specifically in the scene where Harry and Fergie are walking down the street towards the beginning of the film and they are discussing “the look” of people. I noticed that some lines within this scene weren’t quite clear, due to the background noise. As a result, I feel like as an audience member, I may have become lost with whats happening on screen, and may have missed some of the jokes that were being presented. Obviously background noise was inevitable due to the environments we were filming in, but I would try to isolate both Harry and Fergie’s voices so said background noise can be kept at a minimum.
One film that I thought did an amazing job at genre-hybridisation was Rogue. This film utilises key conventions of spy and action movies and incorporates it’s comedy within the main character of Agent Whyte. Furthermore, I thought that the way they expressed comedy within their dialogue was also quite clever and helped create a solid balance within some of the serious scenes. For example, during the scene when the boss was giving Agent Whyte her task , and it was later revealed that the only reason she was assigned said task was because everyone else was out of work due to a “chlamydia outbreak…again”.
Another film that I enjoyed watching from the studio was Trip Up. I think they stayed true to the comedy/adventure drug trip films they were taking influence from, such as The Hangover, and with that, it creates a great opportunity to explore absurdist humour and incongruity. This can be explored through the notion that because all of the main characters are high, they can’t really determine what is real and what is just a hallucination. An example of this is when they were walking down the tunnel trying to find Milly Bobby, when suddenly Josh appears as a Teletubby, and from that chaos ensues.
One studio I decided to have a look at was Art and Impact. This studio explores documentary storytelling and how a documentary can impact social changes. Where are all the queers? is a documentary that discusses the types of clubs and other places that queer people go to and why these said places are important to them. I think this documentary follows the studio’s concern by bringing awareness to the queer community as they discuss the meaning behind having queer friendly places, and how much of an impact it has on to the community as opposed to regular clubs and bars.