Katie's FM3 Creative Project

My initial aims were to create a short film about three imbeciles who try to blow up a chain of fast food restaurants in a desperate attempt to spread the word about animal rights and cruelty.

The chosen genre was comedy, and within that, black comedy. Black comedies poke fun at quite serious issues, often tabooed ones. Terrorism is perceived as tabooed, so it fits the narrative conventions of a black comedy. However, most of these comedies don’t end happily; In Bruges (2008/Martin McDonagh) is just one example. I wanted a resolution and more importantly, a happy ending so I decided to break conventions and let justice come to Max, and Merv and Moon find happiness away from wrongdoing.

To help make my work more comical, I researched the conventions of comedy. I found that the audience usually laugh at two things; The gags and the situation. My film doesn’t contain outright gags but the situation is humourous; Getting into an unsafe taxi, the bomb not detonating and so forth. Comedies also use stereotypes and I decided to create a typical hippy that was concerned with the earth and inner chakras and a stereotypical idiot. The advantages of these stereotypes is that I didn’t need to spend a long time introducing the characters, as we could assume what they were like already.

I wanted the activists to appear moronic, just like the terrorists in Four Lions (2010/Christopher Morris) which is the film that I have based my film upon. In Four Lions the terrorists appear unorganised and unintelligent, so I therefore decided to portray my terrorists as unintelligent.

I thought that portraying them all as moronic was not going to work as at least someone must have had basic organisation skills, so I constructed a character that would be a leader and someone who has common sense. This is also present in Four Lions as the main character, Omar has a basic common sense and is what drives the other characters to train, construct the bombs and so forth. The other two terrorists would be idiotic, with very little common sense and logic - the sidekicks. This of course is why they eventually fail, and I think that the audience want to see them fail; our ideology is that good should prevail and therefore bad must not succeed so I decided to make those who perhaps scares us into complete idiots. Although Four Lions faced a lot of controversy, it did make terrorists look rather silly and I think for some people, this has acted as reassurance. In the film, we can identify the ‘more cleaver’ terrorist from his head hitting and obvious annoyance at the impractical questions asked by the other two. He also gives looks of dumbfounded silence when Merv says he needs to drink his tea, which of course is completely unimportant. Later, the also tells the terrorists not to say anything and reminds them again when they let something slip.

Inverted expectations are a convention of comedy, and I think that the endings of each of my characters can be regarded as inverted expectations. My audience feedback also showed that the audience did not expect the endings.

One of characters had to be extremely stupid so that he could be reason that the team fail and also, to do silly acts that would generate humour. I based Merv, my incredibly docile character, on the character of Neil from The Inbetweeners (2008) who lacks common sense but provides the audience with an abundance of laughs from the idiotic things he does. This is what I wanted in my film, and therefore I created a character that did the most bizarre but amusing things such as leaving the house in a pair of slippers.

My target audience was to be teenagers after my initial questionnaire suggested that teenagers would enjoy this film more because, as one person put it, ‘it sums up teenage mentality’ when asked about the stupidity of the storyline. Most teenagers asked also preferred comedies to other genres. Therefore, when I created my film, I decided to appeal to the audience that like my genre the most. Plus, teenagers make up the mainstream stream audience of 16-24, so it’s also likely that they would be the most common age range to see a film in general.

To appeal to my audience I decided on using characters of a similar age. This was not only convenient but meant that my audience could connect with the terrorists. Although I didn’t want them to sympathise with them, I felt that a teenager would not wish to see a film about forty year olds trying to blow up a restaurant. Additionally, the fact that the characters are younger makes it seem more realistic; They have yet to mature and understand the consequences and idiocy of what they are setting out to do.

I wanted this film to parody and also satirise things. For example, the restaurant chain the three terrorists decided to blow up is named Finger Licking Chicken, or FLC for short. This is a parody of KFC as it uses the same 3 letter abbreviation but also uses their original slogan: Finger Licking Chicken which they dropped for a healthier slogan only two months ago in February. This means that when the audience watch my film, they can immediately make the connection between FLC and KFC.

The terrorists collectively are named ‘Jamhad’ a play on words from the real terrorists of Jihad. This is taking something tabooed like the terrorism of Jihad and turning it into something humorous- a convention of a black comedy. The audience can also make the connection between the terrorists and Jihad and therefore what Jamhad are to do does not have to be explained in the film very much. We all know what these terrorists do. I changed the ’Ji’ to ’Jam’ because Jam is quite an iconographic British food, and his brings the terrorism from the Middle East to England. It’s also a ridiculously stupid name and therefore we take it lightly.

The cinematography in the film is mostly hand-held, but not overly shaky like in a horror film. Initially I set out to use odd camera angles to connotate the oddity of the situation, but in the end, the slight shakiness of the camera I feel has achieved this instead. Odd angles would have reduced the sense of realism in my film too. The shakiness makes the film appear quite documentary like, as if it is a hidden insight into the life of these terrorists. Plus, I wanted the actors to talk into the camera like on a documentary rather than each other. This effect is used in Peep Show (2003), a successful cult-comedy, where the characters use point-of-view shots instead of conversing to each other. It also makes the audience feel more involved as they feel that they are directly being talked to and that they are in fact peeping on something which otherwise in the real world would be very secretive.

Mise-en-scene is something that I gave much attention to. To reinforce the connection between FLC and KFC I chose to display the logo of FLC in the news report which is uncannily like the KFC Colonel Sanders logo; It has the same red background with a man wearing a white suit, and thick black lines giving the impression of a cartoon-like image. My logo is a bald, fairly plum man without a smile in the same style as the KFC logo. I wanted this to make FLC look like a poorer, miserable, mediocre version of KFC. To emphasis this mediocrity even more, I originally set out to film Merv eating from an FLC ‘chicken bargain bucket’ (this is actually an invention of KFC, so the audience again can make the connection from KFC to FLC) which had displayed on it’s side an ingredient list containing things like lard and beef which of course shouldn’t be present in a decent chicken meal. In the end I never filmed Merv eating the chicken as it would have made the film too long. However, in the coda, a picture of the bucket can be seen but without the ingredient list as it wouldn’t fit and scaling it down would result in a loss of clarity for the words so the ingredients would have appeared as a blur, which is not humorous and therefore pointless to add.

For the terrorist video, I decided again to strengthen this idea that the terrorists are stupid by creating a banner that was spelt incorrectly. A terrorist video is the moment were a group can proclaim their love for their cause and I thought that this would be an opportune place for them to make a big mistake as it reflects how little love for their cause they have. ‘Animal Croolty, Save da chikins’ was the message that I chose to be placed on the banner as the incorrect spellings are quite childish, like when a child spells out a word as it should sound. This childish banner reflects my characters perfectly, as if they have the mentality of children and haven’t yet matured.

The reason why I wanted them to wear masks was for two reasons. One, because they would, in the real world, wish to hide their identity. Therefore this created verisimilitude and was one of the few convincing and sensible things the terrorists did. However, they are wearing cheap and ridiculous masks so it’s hard to take them seriously. I came up with this idea after seeing something similar in The League of Gentlemen (1999) were the character is asked to provide a mask for themselves in order to join a group, who are all wearing identical, serene, eerie looking masks. The character however offers a Postman Pat mask which is not only comical but means that we, the audience, cannot take her seriously.

During the part were the terrorists are within company of the taxi driver, I wanted there to be a significant amount of Australian iconography. The humour should be generated when Merv fails to recognise that the taxi driver is from Australia. This dramatic irony combined with the slip up about the bomb should generate humour in this sequence.

Moon’s costume obviously had to connotate hippy, so I added a variety of multi-coloured beads and a flower headband to create a ‘flower power’ look. There isn’t much mention of her as a hippy, especially as some lines had to be cut in order to shorten my film so I had to make sure that the audience could identify that she was in fact a hippy.

News reporters often appear intelligent and smart-looking, so for my character I decided to make him wear glasses which are often associated with intelligence. They are over-sized and quite bold, like the kind you would see in a joke shop which I think creates humour and also makes it hard for us to take the News Reporter seriously.

The taxi-driver had to appear extremely moronic, more so than the three terrorists as they fail to pick-up on the slip-up about the bombs. To make sure that the audience couldn’t take them seriously, the taxi-driver had an obviously bad fake-tanned face. In Australia of course, the tans are legitimate and this makes the audience wonder whether she is indeed a true Australian or just a very weird wannabe. It also looks silly therefore produces humour. Anyone actually paying very close attention will realise that the character is not a true Australian as she provides a UK provisional license, with a very pale faced photo as well.

When Merv is deciding whether to enter the FLC store in his conclusion, he pulls out a five pound note. I used this opportunity to again poke fun at something that I dislike. On the note is an image of David Cameron in the rightful place of the Queen. Although not entirely visible in the film, the words ‘blah blah blah I agree this is money’ is coming from David Cameron’s mouth which is a parody of the words on the real notes ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…’ and makes David Cameron look like an idiot and sloth.

I initially decided to use all diegetic sound in my film but later I found that I could use sound to help make my film more comical. For example, in one bit where the three terrorists are preparing to go their separate ways, you can hear a screeching of tyres which is meant to be people trying to not cause an accident around the taxi. This emphasises the taxi-drivers inability to drive and how ironic it was that Max left the taxi after he decided it was unsafe yet he is on a suicide mission.

I also decided to add music to my coda at the end. The coda was also a late addition, and I felt that it explained in a quick way what happens to the characters afterwards. I wanted non-diegetic titles accompanied by non-diegetic music. It was very quite hard to chose the song because I felt it should be peppy and in high spirits because justice has been served to Max and the other two terrorists have found, oddly, some form of happiness. Even the News Reporter has achieved greater things which can be seen on the image where he is shaking hands with Barack Obama. I decided to choose ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ by Bobby McFerrin as it’s jolly, and contains no lyrics at the beginning to draw attention from the coda and it’s images.

When Moon turns to skip away at the end of her conclusion, I added non-diegetic music to the slowed section. It’s an angelic sounding chorus which connotates Moons innocence.

The editing I wanted to keep simple. Although the characters and even the storyline are hard to take seriously, I wanted the editing to firstly give a sense of continuity and secondly a sense of realism. Therefore there are no flashbacks and all of the film is in chronological order. The only times when time and space are not completely linear is at the beginning where the news report is happening at the same time as the terrorists preparing to depart. This was shown by the non-diegetic transition title ‘meanwhile…’ and helps the audience understand how both of these connect. Later, more non-diegetic titles display the names of the characters as they individually conclude their own missions to make is easier for the audience to understand what is happening.

During the editing stages I also cut out a lot of footage because my video was too long. Certain scenes like the News Report had to be sped up slightly so that they too were shortened. However, I think that the News Report pace was a little too slow and once it was sped up it became more upbeat and realistic. I also changed the speed of Moon’s conclusion at the end so that when she runs away it’s satirical of the slow motion run seen in shows like Baywatch (1990) which most people can recognize.

From my audience feedback I have learnt that continuity has also been achieved. One particular candidate said that they understood what was happening because of the news report at the beginning, as it establishes what has happened and also sets expectations as what is yet to come. However, some said it didn’t always make sense but the narrative was understandable. Yet, one person added that this added to the humour. As for the ending, it received mixed results: some thought it had a conclusion as each character comes to some resolution while others thought that it was more of a cliff-hanger. Although not exactly the results I wished for, it seems that the film has some sense of continuity and it can be watched without the audience becoming completely lost. Additionally, I asked whether the people watching my film had studied Media or Film before and the majority said yes. Consequently, I think that their opinions on the editing and so forth are more important because they can be more analytical towards my film than perhaps someone who doesn’t study Media or Film. So when the majority answered between eight to ten out of a possible ten for things like humour and editing, I feel reassured by their verdict.

In all, I think that my initial aims have somewhat been achieved. Much has been changed since the time that I created my initial aims and storyboards yet I still feel that the mise-en-scene and cinematography are the largest contributors to the humour. I used this film as an opportunity to express my opinions on certain things like KFC, which I do detest and David Cameron who I equally dislike.

According to the dictionary humour is defined as ‘a comic, absurd, or incongruous quality causing amusement’ which I think I have achieved in my film. The storyline is absurd; Who, would want to kill themselves to make a point about animal cruelty in such an ineffective way? Most animal activists are peaceful and that adds to the absurdity. The collection of characters are also absurd and their mentality is ludicrous. I tried to make sure that the audience could not take the film seriously because this too would generate humour. A serious issue like terrorism is not funny, it’s very serious. So to poke fun and approach it lightly is what had to be done in order to make my film funny. I think I have achieved this because my characters are unbelievably stupid, the restaurant is a poor copy of FLC and even the banknote is a parody.

Although it couldn’t be taken seriously, there still had to be an element of realism otherwise it would appear too random and too silly. I used the simple straight cut editing and non-diegetic titles to create continuity and natural lighting to create verisimilitude. I think that my film is humorous, however, if I had had more time, I would have re-shot a lot of my footage to give it a more polished look. My video was also too long, and I feel that some good and funny bits were lost as a result. I’m proud of my finished product and hopefully, it’s humorous to other people as it is to me.