BSA 203 W8 : Comedic Blender

This week I decided that in order to make my film a comedy that slowly rotates through different comedy genres I would need to make a different film - in a different setting, with different story - first in order to see how that works. This idea is essentially a whole other question in and of itself, I feel like I already figured out the question I originally proposed, making that entertaining is a completely different beast though.

The question transforms into:

"How do I make a film where the audience feel like they are experiencing the memory of a dream entertaining through the use of comedy?"

This new question shifts the focus a lot, I had already conceived the narrative ways that I would make the audience feel like they are remembering a dream when I outlined how the story is to be told in reverse and how I want the audience not to know that until the final act. The hurdle I had to jump became less of how to create a dreamlike aesthetic and more about how to still make it entertaining - my very first blog on this paper perfectly encapsulates this (where I call my idea pretentious tripe and communicate my desire to make it more entertaining).

To me entertaining meant making it funny, so I started thinking about how to make the film a comedy with the story structure that already exists. This quickly transformed when I realized that comedy goes through different stages of surreal-ness as much as other films.

To stay true to the concept I decided I would navigate these different types of comedy through the piece until the penultimate point where it feels completely nightmarish (where the humour is more like meme and internet culture, random and non-sensical).

I tried applying this to the prior setup I had and immediately found myself having difficulties visualizing it. I tried putting it in a different context, using a new story I made up specifically for this reason, and it worked much better, below is that new story:

Logline : A recent proprietor of a murder house invites his paranoid friend over to prove to him there is no need to fear the supernatural.

I came up with this idea in an attempt to capture the same kind of set-up seen in the works of Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. This is the type of comedy I wanted for the first part of my film, this would eventually transition on the more bizarre humour of spoof like Airplane! or Police Squad. Finally everything would go completely insane when the film inhabits meme/internet humour such as Eric Andre, Tim and Eric and Vines.

Part 1

A character forcing another to do something they don't want to is a classic trope of Abbott and Costello, I think I capture that here.

For the first and last part of my real film (the parts where the main character is in the real world) I also want to take a comedic approach as this one - the beginning where he has a nightmare and wakes his girlfriend is ripe for this type of slapstick and back and forth. The ending will probably be more tame.

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This transitions into Part 2, which sees a seance unfold where it quickly becomes clear that there is indeed a supernatural presence. I chose this route because spoof movies take an established genre or a set of cliches and pokes fun by changing what happens in the most juvenile of ways. 

A seance scene is a classic that has been done hundreds of times over, I personally haven't seen a spoof rendition of it so I thought it would be a fun experiment to look at some and do the same as Airplane! (which spoof disaster movies of the time) or Police Squad (which spoofs crime procedurals) and take what it already established, twist it and make a ridiculous comedy from it.

I watched some and jotted down some notes for what I could do:

- The Glass moving - This happens in a seance, usually accompanied by an Oujia board, there are fun ways to twist this, with the glass doing ridiculous things like flips or tricks. One of the characters hands could also be possessed, leading on from the Abbott and Costello style, to help the transition feel more natural.

- Often characters are confused during a seance, asking a lot of questions, like "What is it?", in typical fashion of these kinds of comedy the other character should give a very literal answer. E.g. The glass starts moving, "What was that?", "A glass, it's usually used to drink water, but that's not important right now". Wordplay was one of the most important and funniest part of these films, it will have to be heavily present.

- Bad reception - A seance is all about communicating with the dead or the supernatural, this could be translated more literally, making it unfold like a bad connection on a phone call. Maybe an operator even answers.

- One of the characters could get excited and ask to contact someone more famous, or someone closer to them.
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Part 3 is the crazy one, this doesn't have to be very long, but will take place as the ghosts manifest themselves. The journey into the unknown also changes the way the entire film feels, the humour becomes very random and nightmarish as is so commonly seen on the internet these days.

One thing that is quite common in memes is voice distortion at the punchline of a joke, something that is shared by supernatural movies to make demons seem scarier and more out of this world.