Comedy Genre Short Film...

At the beginning of the A2 course, we had our first practice of making a short film. We were given a stimulus to base our short film around and a genre (a documentary style comedy) , and the rest was left to us. Unfortunately, we had a short time limit of 1.5 hours to shoot, so the idea and actors had to be gathered quickly, leaving little time to plan and story board properly. However, I think -judging by my teacher and peers reaction anyway, it turned out to actually be quite funny.

 So here is "A Day in the Life of a Computer Geek" (click on title)

Why it works:
-I think that this mockumentary piece works well because we had a limited time to think of the idea and shoot, and overall the story came together well.
-Also, the choice to shoot it all with a hand-held camera gives it more of a 'real' documentary feel because most documentaries are shot as things happen, so there's no time to set up tripods etc, so the majority of any documentary that follows someone throughout their day is shot hand-held, so the frame is a bit shaky.
-I also like the fact that the actors are pretty good despite being given such short notice to prepare and how most of the dialogue was improvised. I feel like they really fit well into their character stereotypes and make it humorous.
-The sound also contributes to giving it a 'real' feeling- the busy sound of the common room where Keith and his girlfriend are talking demonstrates where they are and how they are almost drowned out by their peers.
-The reaction from my teacher and fellow students leaves me quite confident that the comedy genre is apparent through this short film, despite comedy being a hard genre to work with because of people's varying sense of humors.

Why it doesn't work:
-We were given a very short space of time to shoot and edit, therefore some of the shots and editing could have been vastly improved. A lot of the shots were improvised based on what looked good at the time, and weren't given as much thought as they would have, had this been a final project.
-Also, it is noticeable that in some scenes the dialogue is quite quiet or drowned out by background noise such as the wind outside, noises from other people or just general background grain. This could have all been edited out if we had more time.
-If the editing was smoother and there was more flow to the piece as a whole, it would be much more effective as a mockumentary, however the fact that it was rushed lets it down a lot because it brings the quality of the piece down.
-The script was almost completely improvised on set, therefore if it was thought through and story boarded first before shooting, the acting could have been improved and we could have tried to make it funnier for the audience, instead of thinking of what we think could be funny spontaneously. This ties in with what was mentioned before- comedies are hard to film because everyone has different perceptions of what if 'funny' and what isn't. For example, we (the shooters and actors) found it funny, but that's because we specifically used our own sense of humor in the story. However, if a complete stranger was to watch it they might find it incredibly unfunny or boring. Which hopefully they wouldn't.


-KW