Month: May 2024
Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre – Week 10
Critical feedback…
During this week’s Monday class, we presented our artefact ideas and plans to comedian Hannah Camilleri and comedy writer Stacey. Rouge is the official title of our short film and we are hoping to capture a spy fiction with a sense of adventure and thrill, as well as having comedic moments weaved throughout. After we present our outline, it was great to get some verbal feedback from the comedy pros:
Feedback and my notes in reflection:
From Stacey
- Outline should have comedy “fish out of water”. Get that hook in there – These notes were in reflection of our presentation outline. We needed to add more detail to where the humour lays, for example, we should have describe Agent Whyte’s exaggerated facial expressions and unpredictable reactions.
- Could do direct to cam in the modern world? – this was an interesting idea! We may play with this when we shoot. Our worry is that we are doing al ot of filming in the city which can be difficult when capturing live audio.
- Set up the 60s more. Take inspiration from Austin Powers – As a group, we spoke about this extensively. The time we spend in the past is minimal and frankly we do not have time to ‘set up’ the past world like Stacey is describing. We have realised from her feedback that we do need to do what we can to communicate the setting to our audience. One change we will make is Agent Whyte’s dialogue. We will remove the modern curse words that we have chosen, and replace them with old fashioned phrases like ‘Bloody Nora’, ‘oh drat’ etc.
- Find the comedy in the situation, that is the best approach. – while we have written in humorous dialogue, we do intend to find comedic moments through actions and performance. We feel that it will be better executed if we improvise said actions and build upon them from there.
- Clumsy in 2024, not previous. Other film makers choose to do this, make the character clumsy for the whole film, what about this comes out in the modern world? – This was tough to hear. We want to be as original as possible, however we have all fallen inlove with the clumsiness of Agent Whyte. Again, we will see how this goes when we shoot our past scenes. Maybe we try make her as serious as possible when she is in the past world? No falling over!
- More heightened moments to lead to underwhelming moments – We love this and really want to manipulate this type of comedy throughout our film
- Go further with satire, make fun of the world, be ridiculous! – We love this as well! Now that we have our narrative structured, we want to go in with bigger and exaggerated ideas for when Whyte is in the modern world.
- “All your unique qualities *pause* and all my other agents are sick” – we will add the pause to this section of script
From Hannah
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There is a lot of describing in the script regarding actions and emotions. Let it come naturally, this is how to be the most authentic character possible – couldn’t agree more. I have experience with acting and couldn’t totally understand what she meant. At the end of the day, we had added a lot of description to may the mood clear in the script (it was so all group members could be on the same page)
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Maybe Agent Whyte is not out of touch? – maybe she is way too interested in her work? another way to approach the character – Something to consider. We do want Agent Whyte to have moments of reason, she won’t be totally unaware of what is going on.
It was so great to get this type of feedback, it almost felt like a collaboration. I think the hardest part is letting go of certain parts of the film that we once thought was great, but have now realised that there is better options.
NOW WE SHOOT!
Wow, we are ready to start shooting! For this week, our shooting days are Wednesday and Sunday. Wednesday’s shoot will be all of our scenes in the past world, and Sunday’s shoot will involve a full day of capturing our montage scenes. We will also film on Monday next week if required.
To expand on my reflection further, I will write about our shooting experience as a whole on my next blog post 🙂
Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre – Week 9
Things are coming together…
A lot of progress has been made this week and we have pieced together our script. On Monday, Chloe and Oscar committed to finalising the first two scenes, and the rest of us committed to writing a few scenes each which will play in the middle of the film.
When coming back together on Wednesday, Bradley asked the question, ‘what would you say your mode or style of comedy is?’, and I must admit, our answers were scattered. We have moments of parody but we do feel like our overall production is a genre hybridisation, Adventure/Action Comedy.. In Glyn White and John Mundy’s text, Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Television, and Radio Comedy (2012, CH.6), they recognise that Genre Hybridisation is a complex term that is limited. The correct word to use should be UNlimited. The boundaries of what Genre Hybridisation is, is ever so changing, it depends on the genre, the narrative ect. Something that Bradley told us during class, which helped better my understanding, was to imagine a film like Scary Movie (2000) not having any comedic moments within the film, it would pretty much not exist or make sense. Now imagine a film like An American Werewolf in London (1981), if you were to remove the comedic moments, the film would still make sense and have its horror genre. Our film is similar. If we were to eliminate any comedic moments, we would still have an action spy film. I feel like I am really starting to understand more of what the term ‘Genre Hybridisation’ means and how to identify it.
Back to the group work, another thing that we wanted to do before the end of the week was share our schedules and availability for the weeks ahead. We want to get most of our filming done next week (week 10) which will allow us a lot of time for editing. It seems that we will be able to do most of our filming on Wednesday 15/05 and Sunday 19/05, and then we have extra availability on Monday 20/05 if we need to film more.
Here are all of the documents created this week:
OFFICIAL SCRIPT – room for edits
Reference:
- Mundy, J. & White, G. (2012), “Comedy and Genre Boundaries.” in Laughing Matters: Understanding Film, Television and Radio Comedy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 130–148.
Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre – Week 8
Brainstorm, brainstorm, and more brainstorm…
‘This is a chaotic way to write, but I find that chaos to be helpful.’ (M Trapp, 2022) – Mike Trapp’s interpretation of brainstorming, and I could not agree more! We have been brainstorming for two week’s and it has finally paid off. I appreciate that brainstorming can be a great writing tool in a group setting as well as individually.
Wow, this week has consisted of a lot of brainstorming and fleshing out ideas. I was away the previous week, so I have come back to lots of open ideas from the group. We know we want to create a fictional story that follows a fictional character, and use genre hybridisation as our dominant mode of comedy.
With that in mind, the genre had not been decided for our piece, so that is what we worked on in our Monday class. After a bit of back and forth, and looking at our mood boards; Mood Boards ,we decided to think more of WHY our character is going to the future. From that discussion, I thought that our character could be on a mission and needs something from the future, like a spy/agent. As a group, we fleshed out this idea and decided it would be best to make our project a short film, rather than a series. Our film will be a journey, with a beginning, middle and end. Our spy gets given a mission, they travel to the future, do the mission whilst also being interrupted by modern day complications, then they solve the mission and come back to HQ.
Through the week, our mood boards have now changed from The Wizard of Oz (1939) and 17 Again (2009), to Men In Black (1997-2019) and Johnny English (2003). The genre that we will be hybridising is Action/Adventure, and we hope to capture a lot of our comedic moments through the character of Agent Whyte.
On Wednesday, we had a break through! You see, we knew we were sending Agent Whyte on a mission, however it was tough to create this mission. With limited resources and cast, we struggled to think of clues. We then came up with the idea that another agent, Agent Wolley, has travelled to the future to steal a list that the Boss of the agency wants. It is Agent Whyte’s mission to capture Agent Wolley and the list. We discussed this at length and all felt like this will be an achievable outcome.
Our goal is to have our 1st and 2nd draft written up by the end of next week. Here is our 1st vomit draft;
Reference:
- Trapp, M. (2022), “So You’ve Got A Good Idea… Now What?: Brainstorms & Outlines”, Chuffah, <https://chuffah.substack.com/p/brainstorms-and-outlinesLinks to an external site.>.
Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre – Week 7
The beginning of something great…
This is the first week of creating and making our final project. In my group is Anna, Chloe, Bobby and Oscar. We all have a flexible attitude and seem to already be accepting of particular roles for the project. I think we will all contribute to the overall narrative because we are loaded with ideas.
I was absent for most of this week but here is some of the work that was documented:
- We immediately created a google drive folder so that our work can easily be shared and collaborated.
- A group contract was put together, outlining our commitment and communication to the project.
- Separate mood boards were made. These mood boards included mostly images and screenshot of shows and characters that we can get inspiration from. Some examples are Mr Bean, Hairspray, 17 Again, The Wizard of Oz, The Good Place, Napoleon Dynamite ect -> I will explain in the next dot point.
- We want to create a short form series which follows a particular character who transports to a different timeline and experiences the future and all its propaganda. The idea is that we will satirise a lot of real-life-modern tropes through our character. we feel as though there are so many things in the modern world that are quite ridiculous and frankly, extra, so we want to “make fun” of that. For example, the obsession with our phones.
Here are the links to our documents so far: