FMP Journal Two – Over February Half Term
FMP – What Genre?
I have been thinking about what genre I wanted to make my fiction film. Something that I have enjoyed doing in all my films so far, is giving them a little comedic twist. For example, in my first Year 1 film, “Poker Hand”, I made it that one player was being dealt normal playing cards, and the other was being dealt UNO cards. And the extra twist at the end was when the player with normal cards thought they had won, but the UNO cards player was dealt an “UNO reverse card” which meant that he beat the guy with the normal cards. In my Toast Advert, I used the theme of a James Bond style Spy, fighting off the bad guys to deliver a silver briefcase containing … Toast! And for our group Black and White silent movie, I had the idea of doing a game of musical chairs with 2 players, where player 1 is trying to intimidate player 2 in a comedic way. As the music stops, player 1 thinks he has won and goes to sit down on the chair, but player 2 quickly pulls the chair away in a classic slapstick move, just as player 1 is about to sit on it, resulting in player 1 falling on the floor.
I do like these comedic twists, so I am thinking that comedy of some kind is a good genre for me. I know there are various different types of comedy, for example, slapstick like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd, and more recently Mr Bean and Jim Carrey. One area of research for me to do is to research the different types of comedy.
I will research my target audience particularly BBC Three which I think from what I have would be a good home for a comedy short.
Also, I think it would be interesting to research why people find things funny, since that would hopefully help me to make my film amusing. I watched a YouTube video of a TEDx talk called “What makes things funny” by Peter McGraw, from 2010. He is a behavioural scientist. In this TEDx video, he discusses “The Benign Violation Theory” of why things are funny. This basically means that something is out of place or unexpected (violation) but also it is harmless (benign). He argues that something needs to be both Benign AND a Violation to be funny. It’s like we have to know that something is “safe” in order to laugh at it. If it’s not safe, if someone really gets hurt then it’s a tragedy not a comedy. Peter McGraw also said that creating a Benign Violation is easier said than done though. He quoted the American humourist Erma Bombeck (1927-1996) who said that “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humour and hurt.”
But, looking online, there seem to be a number of different comedy theories, so that will be an interesting area to research.
Also, I watched another YouTube video called “Getting a Laugh: How to Make Something Funny” by “Casually Explained”. This also talked about the importance of delivery in making something humorous, and also “cadence” which basically means timing, rhythm and pace. In an article that I found online, titled “A Cadence of Comedy” by Stephanie Lim, she is arguing that comedy has a link with poetry because of the importance of rhythm and pace in both. She says that something that is tied in with the rhythm and pace, is the length of the specific words chosen. She quotes stand-up comedian Jerry Seinfeld as saying about his own writing technique that “If it’s too long, if it’s just a split second too long, you will shave letters off words, you count syllables.” I heard quite a while ago that timing is everything in comedy. All this seems to back that up.
If I can understand how to deliver comedy, then this will help me to write a humorous script, and it will help me as director to direct my actors to deliver their lines in the best way to make it funny.
This has shown me that there are a lot of areas that I can research to help me to write a humorous script. Writing humour will be a challenge, but I am looking forward it.