The Chick Flick genre..

Chick Flick is a slang term, often used pejoratively, for a film mainly dealing with female characters and designed to appeal to a female target audience. Although many types of films may be directed toward the female gender.

Here is a list of popular Chick Flick genre films:

1. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days -Kate Hudson
2. Sweet Home Alabama DVD - Reese Witherspoon
3. Pretty Woman
4. The Sweetest Thing -Cameron Diaz
5. Coyote Ugly DVD - Piper Perabo
6. Thirteen going on Thirty 
7. The Wedding Planner DVD -Jennifer Lopez
8. Miss Congeniality DVD -Sandra Bullock
9. Angus Thongs and Perfect Snogging
10. Never Been Kissed DVD -Drew Barrymore
11. My Best Friend's Wedding -Julia Roberts
12. Legally Blonde DVD  -Reese Witherspoon
13. 10 Things I Hate About You DVD  -Julia Stiles
14. She's All That DVD  -Freddie Prinze Jr.
15. Mean Girls –Lindsey Lohan

We will look at some of these films in greater detail in order to get some ideas on how to portray a good Chick Flick/Comedy film. We particularly liked the style of mean girls in their use of colourful quirky credits. Perhaps we will do something similar when editing our film opening.

Research- using www.google.co.uk

Comedy Films are "make 'em laugh" films designed to elicit laughter from the audience. Comedies are light-hearted dramas, crafted to amuse, entertain, and provoke enjoyment. The comedy genre humorously exaggerates the situation, the language, action, and characters. Comedies observe the deficiencies, foibles, and frustrations of life, providing merriment and a momentary escape from day-to-day life. They usually have happy endings, although the humor may have a serious or pessimistic side.

Types of comedies:

Comedies usually come in two general formats: comedian-led (with well-timed gags, jokes, or sketches) and situation-comedies that are told within a narrative. Both comedy elements may appear together and/or overlap. Comedy hybrids commonly exist with other major genres, such as musical-comedy, horror-comedy, and comedy-thriller. Comedies have also been classified in various subgenres, such as romantic comedy, crime/caper comedy, sports comedy, teen or coming-of-age comedy, social-class comedy, military comedy, fish-out-of-water comedy, and gross-out comedy. There are also many different kinds, types, or forms of comedy, including:


Slapstick

Slapstick was predominant in the earliest silent films, since they didn't need sound to be effective, and they were popular with non-English speaking audiences in metropolitan areas. The term slapstick was taken from the wooden sticks that clowns slapped together to promote audience applause.

This is primitive and universal comedy with broad, aggressive, physical, and visual action, including harmless or painless cruelty and violence, horseplay, and often vulgar sight gags (e.g., a custard pie in the face, collapsing houses, a fall in the ocean, a loss of trousers or skirts, runaway crashing cars, people chases, etc). Slapstick often required exquisite timing and well-honed performance skills. It was typical of the films of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, The Three Stooges, the stunts of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923), and Mack Sennett's silent era shorts (for example, the Keystone Kops). Slapstick evolved and was reborn in the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s.

More recent feature film examples include the comedic mad chase for treasure film by many top comedy stars in Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and French actor/director Jacques Tati's mostly dialogue-free Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953, Fr.), and Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (1993) and The Mask (1994).

This form of comedy was best exemplified by the expression-less face of stoic comic hero Buster Keaton.

Verbal comedy

This was classically typified by the cruel verbal wit of W. C. Fields, the sexual innuendo of Mae West, or the verbal absurdity of dialogues in the Marx Brothers films, or later by the self-effacing, thoughtful humor of Woody Allen's literate comedies.

Screwball

Screwball comedies, a sub-genre of romantic comedy films, was predominant from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s. The word 'screwball' denotes lunacy, craziness, eccentricity, ridiculousness, and erratic behavior.

These films combine farce, slapstick, and the witty dialogue of more sophisticated films. In general, they are light-hearted, frothy, often sophisticated, romantic stories, commonly focusing on a battle of the sexes in which both co-protagonists try to outwit or outmaneuver each other. They usually include visual gags (with some slapstick), wacky characters, identity reversals (or cross-dressing), a fast-paced improbable plot, and rapid-fire, wise-cracking dialogue and one-liners reflecting sexual tensions and conflicts in the blossoming of a relationship (or the patching up of a marriage) for an attractive couple with on-going, antagonistic differences (such as in The Awful Truth (1937)). Some of the stars often present in screwball comedies included Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, William Powell, and Carole Lombard.

The couple is often a fairly eccentric, but well-to-do female interested in romance and a generally passive, emasculated, or weak male who resists romance, such as in Bringing Up Baby (1938), or a sexually-frustrated, humiliated male who is thwarted in romance, as in Howard Hawks' farce I Was a Male War Bride (1949). The zany but glamorous characters often have contradictory desires for individual identity and for union in a romance under the most unorthodox, insane or implausible circumstances (such as in Preston Sturges' classic screwball comedy and battle of the sexes The Lady Eve (1941)). However, after a twisting and turning plot, romantic love usually triumphs in the end. (See more discussion later in this section.)

These are dark, sarcastic, humorous, or sardonic stories that help us examine otherwise ignored darker serious, pessimistic subjects such as war, death, or illness. Two of the greatest black comedies ever made include the following: Stanley Kubrick's Cold War classic satire from a script by co-writer Terry Southern, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) that spoofed the insanity of political and military institutions with Peter Sellers in a triple role (as a Nazi scientist, a British major, and the US President), and Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970), an irreverent, anti-war black comedy set during the Korean War. Another more recent classic black comedy was the Coen Brothers' violent and quirky story Fargo (1996) about a pregnant Midwestern police chief (Oscar-winning Frances McDormand) who solves a 'perfect crime' that went seriously wrong.

Hal Ashby's eccentric cult film Harold and Maude (1972) was an oddball love story and dark comedy about a suicidal 19 year-old (Bud Cort) and a quirky, widowed octogenarian. 

John Huston's satirical black comedy Prizzi's Honor (1985) starred Jack Nicholson as dimwitted Mafia hit man Charley Partanna for the East Coast Prizzi family, who fell in love with West Coaster Irene Walker (Kathleen Turner) - another mob's hitwoman. 

Tim Burton's dark and imaginative haunted house comedy Beetle juice (1988) featured Michael Keaton as the title character in a dream house occupied by newlywed spirits Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin. 

The shocking but watchable first film of Peter Berg, Very Bad Things (1998) told the dark and humorous story of a 'bachelor' weekend in Las Vegas gone bad for five guys when their hired stripper/prostitute was accidentally killed.

Spoof 

These specific types of comedy (also called put-ons, send-ups, charades, lampoons, take-offs, jests, mockumentaries, etc.) are usually a humorous or anarchic take-off that ridicules, impersonates, punctures, scoffs at, and/or imitates (mimics) the style, conventions, formulas, characters (by caricature), or motifs of a serious work, film, performer, or genre.

Parody/

Black or Dark Comedy

Deadpan

In today's lesson we spent the whole afternoon filming and editing on imovie. We used lots of different locations and different types of shots, all of which we all felt was appropriate for our comedy genre. We experimented with speeding up and slowing down the shots on imovie, trying to learn how to apply different effects to our video. However we are still in the process of editing, all we have to do now is to add some upbeat lively music and maybe add in some more effects.


Here is also the criteria we will have to meet during the process of making our film opening..

G321 Marking Criteria

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Here is our preliminary video..



As you can see we have experimented with some different types of shots. My group decided to do a shot of Alice's feet walking through the door when she enters. We all thought this worked really well and looked effective merely because it made her entrance look more dramatic and the change in camera level made it more interesting for the viewer.

After editing our video we noticed that it didn't flow quite as nicely as it could have in places. It seemed slightly too snappy every time the shot changed. However it has left us room for improvement as now we know for next time how to make our videos look even better. Creating the preliminary video has allowed us to experiment with different shots and given us more experience using imovie, so that we know exactly how to use it when editing our two minute film opening.

Our indoor location..

As you can see it has all the things we need, big wardrobe doors for shot 15, windows near to the bed which are able to open fully for when the alarm clock gets thrown out, and also there is plenty of space so that we aren't struggling with the camera and tripod. 

Here you can see that the mirror is next to a window which is ideal for when the camera pans around to shoot the person outside lying on the ground attracting a crowd (shot 14)

This is a shot of what's outside the window and as you can see there is a very large drive meaning that who ever is lying on the ground will be on private property, not disturbing any one. It is also far enough away from the road so no one will be in any danger from cars. It's not a busy street therefore there won't be much problem with continuity of people walking by or cars driving past.

In this lesson we wanted to start experimenting with the equipment and film some of the shots we are hoping to include in our film opening. This video was taken on the flip video recorder. Its a simple video clip however it's an example of a point of view shot (viewer can see what the character is seeing) which we want to definitely use at some point in our film.

I chose to film my feet walking along and running down the stairs as this is what we'd like to use the point of view shot for, some time during our opening. The camera shaking is intentional, we really like this effect as it makes it feel more realistic.

We also managed to start looking at different music to use in our film opening. We found a website  http://freeplaymusic.com/search/category_search.php?t=v&i=49 and from this we found a piece called 'cool shade's' which we believe is not copyrighted, however we will check this so that were 100% sure. Its upbeat and lively which we feel reflects the genre of the film.  

Here is a video of our film proposal telling everyone our ideas in order to get some feedback and see if what are hoping to do is possible.



In todays lesson we cracked down on story boarding our film opening, putting all our ideas together to make a more detailed plan. Nothing is completely set in stone yet however here is what we've come up with so far..

Ideas for story boarding:

Location

Alice's sister has kindly given permission to use her bedroom for our indoor location as it seems to have everything we need for example a mirror next to a window (for shot 14).


shots


1. pictures presents..
2. alarm clock
3. alarm clock (shot is closer this time)
4. alarm clock (extreme close up of clock when the alarm goes off) arm reaches to turn it off
5. girl sits up (big hair, smudged make-up, hungover) shot freezes-voice over (meet...)
6. struggles with alarm clock
7. throws out window
8. clock flies out window
9. runs to window (oops..)
10. someone is lying on ground outside (hit by alarm clock)
11. shuts window (embarrassed, doesnt want to get caught)
12. looking in mirror (camera acts as mirror so she is looking into camera instead)
13. brushes hair (over shoulder shot) brush breaks (knotted hair)
14. (camera pans round so that window is in shot, girl unaware) person lying on ground attracts a crowd
15. hands opening wardrobe
16. pulls out different outfits and throws them behind
17. tries on outfit (camera zooms in)
18. (when camera zooms out she is in a different oufit) zooms in again
19. (zooms out) she is again in a different oufit (takes off top, throws, lands on camera, creates black out effect-perhaps some credits here or title may come up)
20. finds outfit (looks flustered) turns around skirt tucked into pants
21. feet running downstairs (point of view shot-camera held by actor)
22. (quick snappy shots) grabs bowl
23. grabs cereal
24. grabs juice (hear sound of cutlery as if getting spoon)
25. grabs bag
26. exits house (long distance shot)
27. close up of her face (discusted at cereal realises she has put juice in instead of milk) looks over at crowd surrounding injured person
28. shot of crowd
29. close up of girls face (shocked)
30. shot of alarm clock on floor and her feet, kicks it behind a bin
31. actor from crowd looks over
32. girl walks over, hands cereal to person in crowd scurries off in a hurry
33. confused face of by stander
34. shot of cereal floating in juice
35. long shot of girl walking down road
36. over shoulder head shot bus in distance drives past
37. bus pulls up
38. girl sitting on bus
39. starts to fall asleep hits head on seat in front
40. (shot of lips) tries to apply lipstick-accidentally draws over her cheek because the bus is moving
41. gets off bus
42. walks down road (point of view shot of feet)

Although there seems to be lots of different shots, most of them are only a couple of seconds long and so were confident that after editing our film opening, it will be just two minutes long.

Film Proposal

Film Proposal

1. Is your idea PRACTICALLY possible to film? (no speeding trains, sea battles etc)

Yes our film opening will be possible to film, as we are planning on keeping it quite simple, no special effects like gun shots.

2. Will it show off the strengths of EVERY member of your group?
If we all find we have different strengths, then we'll try to allocate everyone with something their good at but we'll try to make it as equal as possible, taking it in turns to film and edit.

3. Can it be storyboarded okay?
It shouldn't be a problem putting our ideas on paper although it will take alot of thought and time in order to make sure everything is planned properly.

4. Is it something you can reasonably shoot and edit in the time available?

Yes, hopefully if all goes well we'll only need a day for shooting, and as for the editing i'm confident that our film will be finished in time.

5. Can you get access/permission to shoot in the chosen location at the chosen times?

Our idea may include a bus and/or a train, however Valentina's dad is a bus driver so we're hoping to have permission to use his bus if possible. On the other hand most of the other shots are likely to be filmed at home so hopefully there shouldn't be any big problems.

6. Would lighting/sound be an issue on location?

It is likely that we'll add all the sound in when editing (music).  This is because if we were to include dialogue we may find it difficult to get a clear sound with no background noise. Lighting shouldn't be much of a problem as not much of our film opening will be shot outdoors but also were hoping to shoot over one day.

7. Are you going to include dialogue? If so, can you do it on location or will you need to add it later?

We have decided not to use dialogue (not 100% sure yet.)

8. Who will be cast as your characters on screen? Are they reliable? Will continuity be an issue?
Only members of our group will be cast as the characters on screen so that we will not have to rely on others and continuity should not be an issue as again we will be filming over one day.

9. Have you thought about style of credits and soundtrack?
We really want the credits and the soundtrack to reflect the genre of the movie (comedy), so we may include some funky special effects.

In today's lesson we got into our final groups and started to think about what we might like to do for our film openings. We also began to experiment with using story boards by story boarding one of last years preliminary videos.

Here are some examples: