For our A2 media product, we had to make a short film of our choice, we

decide to make a comedy film, which we knew would be a challenge as it can be

difficult to successfully deliver a comedy film that both please and amuses the

audience.

We decided to watch several different short student films on YouTube and other comedy films to get inspiration for our idea. This short film here inspired us to use the idea of having one person in an awkward/uncomfortable situation which was comical for the audience. We wanted to base the film around an every day life event, and decided to use public transport as we all travel on the train daily – which gives us first hand experience of being in awkward/uncomfortable situations on the train. We decided to use the most stereotypical annoying people which would make the main character feel uncomfortable as we have all experienced the same thing and feel the audience would be able to relate to our film for the same reason. Our film is mainly aimed 16-21 year olds as statistically they are more likely to use public transport on a day to day basis due to college and work so they would be able to put themselves straight into the main characters position, which is also why we made our film from the main characters point of view, as its easier for the audience to put themselves in the characters position as its as if this is what they are seeing with their own eyes.

With independent research, I decided to research the codes and conventions of the comedy genre. The main idea of the comedy genre is to evoke laughter/humour from the audience using different elements. I found that the comedy genre is made up of different elements, our film uses the ‘Social Comedy’ element, which is where the environment and the situation the person is in makes it comical - with our film, the person being stuck in the confined space of a train with the most stereotypical annoying people makes the situation itself comical.

Another convention of the comedy genre is that it includes ‘The Gag’ which is the verbal/visual jokes in the film. Our film doesn’t so much include verbal jokes but more visual jokes, seeing as we used the technique known as ‘Dual Role’ where an actor plays more then one character in the same film – this has been used in famous comedy films such as ‘The Nutty Professor’ with Eddie Murphy.

The two ancillary texts we had to create where a film poster and a double page spread. I looked at other film posters for comedy films

and realised they all used a simple layout with bright colours. I experimented with several idea’s and actually decided to base

my film poster’s layout on the film Trainspotting’s layout – with the idea of having all the characters lined up and each character having a pose/emotion which shows their personality, giving the audience an idea of what to expect from the film. To produce this, we had a

photo shoot of all the characters as we thought this would be more effective then using screen shots from the film. I also stuck to the comedy poster convention of using bright colours and came up

with the slogan ‘We are now approaching madness’ which is a mix of saying what station the train is approaching and the fact that

the character is about to be driven mad.

With my double page spread, I decided to use a screen shot for the main picture which took up the majority of the page as

the magazine article is an “Exclusive behind the scenes” interview, so having a screen shot from the film gives a sneak

preview to the readers. I made the title ‘Quiet Zone’ in the magazine a similar font to the font used in the film poster so

they could be recognisable to each other. The article was difficult to write as all three of us in my group made the film and directed it together, so I decided to do a ‘Question and

Answer’ style interview between the interviewer of the magazine and all us three directors.

I feel that both the film poster and the double page spread support my film well by giving the audience a broad idea of what to expect from the film. I feel that the film poster is the more successful ancillary text as

it would draw the audience in as it makes the film look interesting and makes the audience question what it could be about. Where as with the double

page spread, if readers don’t recognise the director’s or film title they are more likely to skip the article

and not pay much attention to it.

Audience feedback is one of the most important things as the audience brings in the revenue and without the

audience there is no film.Working in a group was an advantage as we gave each

other feed back on our idea’s and agreed on what worked and what didn’t. We showed other people to get

there opinions on our film as it was being edited. Unfortunately we did not get a chance to get other

audience feedback as we had trouble filming our footage and when editing our film, we found that most files

where corrupted which cost us a lot of time!

Media technologies where used for my whole project, I hardly used any paper based work except from when taking down notes and creating a rough story board. The Mac computer was the main technology product I used to create my blog and make my film. I used photo shop when making my film

poster – using tools such as the lasso tool and cloning stamp. I also used photo shop to create the opening title for our film

‘Quiet Zone’ by following a tutorial online – I found this to be one of the most complicated things I had created on photo

shop. I used Indesign to create my film’s double page spread. This was the first time I’d ever used this programme and

found it very helpful when making my double page spread and also found it easy to use.

We used three different camera’s for our project. The reason for this was one camera was used for a photo shoot so we could

use pictures for our ancillary texts. Then we began filming with one camera, but we needed permission from the

manager of the train station to film on their train’s which we was only told half way through filming. So once we got

permission we began filming again, yet this was on a different camera due to the camera we was previously using being

unavailable – yet we found no difference in the quality of our filming, the only problem being was that half of our footage

being corrupted for an unknown reason, yet this was resolved by using another programme to convert the files.

One of the main programmes I used to edit my film was Final Cut Pro. I have used this programme before when creating a short film ‘Experiment 235’ earlier on in the year, so this helped me and I was able to experiment

more with the programme as I already knew the basics. I used Tumblr to write my own individual blog and also our group blog. I have my own personal Tumblr and we also used it in media last year so I was already accustomed to Tumblr and how it worked. We used the internet to

help with research for our project – such as YouTube, to get idea’s by watching other short films, as well as Facebook and Twitter to get audience feedback.