(De/Re)constructing Genre // A2 Film Reflection

I am quite happy with the result of this assignment, and I think The Mug uses genre in the most noticeable and meaningful way of any of my work for this class yet. One thing in particular I think this might be impacted by is the use of sound effects and sound design, something which I have largely ignored up until this point. Turns out, it really goes a long way in setting the tone.

The genre I chose was “90s sitcom”, although upon reflection, I guess that may in fact be an era and a genre combined? Or maybe not? I would say a 1950s horror film is starkly different from a 2010s horror film, so could you consider them as different ‘subgenres’ altogether?

In order to make this style work I knew that I would have to add lots of exaggerated sound effects, and when colour grading the footage, we decided to add a VHS video effect to the footage, to help give it the specific ‘look’ of that era. I think this worked really well.

There were a few problems with my footage, the first being the original takes we got for the line “I couldn’t find any tea” felt like an incorrect response to the “Is that coffee I smell?” question. While this is hard to demonstrate in words, the intonation of the sentence (particularly in the word “tea”) lead to the wrong conclusion, even though the words were perfectly according to script. To solve this, we decided to just reshoot that line. You’ll notice if you pay close attention, the rain outside is a lot louder, and Mel’s hair is not quite the same.
I also had not planned on cropping the sides of the image before editing, so I ended up with some footage that was framed less than ideally. This is particularly noticeable in the “I hope you like chamomile” shot, which I eventually zoomed out into a two shot. Because of the crop the framing no longer worked, and I had to animate some properties to get the right person in frame. It shows in the video, but it was too late for a reshoot.

I really loved the delivery of the lines, together the actors I recruited (Ben playing SAM, and Missa playing MEL) came up with some great little flourishes, like pointing to camera, winks, and just general exaggerations of certain parts, and I think this worked extremely well.

Another thing I tried to do when filming these scenes was to keep my camera in pretty much one place, and as far away from the actors as possible (which didn’t end up being awfully far). I did this because (as far as I’m aware), this is how these kind of sitcom shoots would be staged, with a fake room being setup in a studio, and cameras on wheels set up around the edge of the set. This would mean that zooming is far more practical than actually moving the camera towards or away from the actors. Obviously mockumentary style sitcoms (and I’m sure there’s plenty of other examples too) would break this setup, but from shows like Seinfeld, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, etc (where the majority of the show happens in a small handful of locations, mostly set up on sound stages), this seems to me like it’d be the most practical and likely way of shooting.

Overall, I’m happy with the way this short experiment turned out. It’s quite rough around the edges, but most of that was intentional/for comic effect. I’d be interested to see how it is received by the writer of the original script.

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