Transnational Format – Da Kath & Kim Code

During week 12’s lecture the concept of the Transnational format was explored through The Office and its move from Britain to America. I’d like to explore how the transnational format works and doesn’t by comparing the success of The Office to the failure of Kath & Kim in the US.

The difference between American and British Humour is an article in which Ricky Gervais, the creator of the original series The office, talks about the changes that had to be made in the American version of The office. It was understood that American and British humour were different and what would seem funny to the British seemed offensive to America. One of the main changes that Gervais mentions is the change in Michael Scott, the main character, who used to be teasing and ironic sarcasm his main weapon, had to turn into a nice guy, with a “rosier outlook to life”. So even though it is the same show with the same title and the same characters, changes had to be made to reach the national culture of its viewers. It is fair to say that The Office US was a huge success, starting in 2005 the show ran for 9 seasons, potentially proving that changing a show to suit a different national audience is possible (Time 2011).

There is however, plenty of examples where the format failed. Kath & Kim was written, produced and cast in Australia. The show was extremely successful in Australia running for 4 seasons including two movies. The television show is set in a fictional town in the Melbourne outer-suburbs and draws humour from the “bogan” caricature of a mother and daughter relationship. “The humour is derived from local references, garish costuming and cringe-worthy mispronunciations to create a light-hearted parody in representation of the Australian lower middle-class” (Webb 2013). Ultimately this show is a success because it draws on the ability of its Australian audience to laugh at themselves.

In 2008 Kath and Kim was sent overseas into America, there was big hype about it in Australia, a sense of national pride that we were now influencing America. Unfortunately the hype didn’t last long and the show was cancelled after only 2 episodes aired, due to low ratings. Why did this happen? The shows format was translated into an American equivalent, instead of the Australian “Bogan”, they were America “White Trash”, the story followed the day to day lives of a mother and daughter relationship and the actors had an American accent! There is no denying that it was American. So, without including outlying factors, the only thing to blame is the American audience didn’t like the format, which was originally Australian. Where the Australian culture was happy to laugh at themselves and understood the joke, American culture is not as prone to self humiliation as a form of humour (Webb 2013).

It is interesting to note, however, that Australians have been watching American comedies for years, Friends, Seinfeld, How I Met your Mother and the Big bang theory have all stayed on our screens for multiple seasons, which raises the question if you truely have a transnational format, do you need to change anything, or can you send it over pre-packaged? There is definitely other factors that should be considered like locations within the story, money, star power and international acclaim, however if we’re just taking the show for face value, sometimes the format of a show just doesn’t fit with the culture of a certain audience.

Ultimately Kath & Kim failed in America because it didn’t reach its local audience like it had in Australia. This is due to the fact that the two different cultures possessed different attributes in humour, the irony and sarcasm lost in the US audience which is the entire format of the show.

References

Webb, M 2013, Television, ‘Humour and Transnational Audiences’, weblog post, 2 December, The Artifice, viewed 26 October 2015, <http://the-artifice.com/television-humour-and-transnational-audiences/>

Time 2011, ‘The difference between British and American Humour’, Time inc., viewed 26 October 2015, <http://time.com/3720218/difference-between-american-british-humour/>

 

Exhibition Artefact

As was mentioned in my previous post, it was my responsibility to cut together a 1 minute screener to be shown during the studio presentations. It took my a few hours in the editing suites but I got there.

My main problem was editing out 40 seconds of footage, which is a lot considering the footage that I was using was already cut down into trailers. Have the two trailers as a starting point was really helpful because I already had the footage the idea and the mood of how the video would go. After talking to Paul I decided to cut the two trailers evenly into two 30 second pieces. The first piece (which I titled the explanation) is a more informative piece which describes the back story to the plot and introduces the character and location a bit. The second trailer (titled the trailer) was more of a teaser trailer, it introduced the idea of genre being a common them but a part from the that it was merely exciting and suspenseful. I really wanted the second trailer to look epic and I think I’ve done it well enough to seem it. All shall be revealed come exhibition day.

Here is the edited trailer I created as a screener for the studio presentation and exhibition day:

Collaboration

There isn’t much to say that hasn’t been said in my previous post about collaboration but in a nutshell here it is. As a group we made sure that everything was decided evenly. We tended to work in stages and everyone had a job for that stage, even if they weren’t the same job, classic example: everyone else was writing scripts, whilst I was editing scripts; everyone was buys sourcing talent, whilst I was organising and writing up a call sheet. There were definitely times where people strengths and weaknesses showed, like in any other situation. The creative writers were in their element when writing the scripts and the media students generally took the back seat to learn. Then when it came to the production side of things the media students were in their element and the creative writers took the back seat to learn.

If you’ve ever heard of the phrase too many cooks you understand thins paragraph. There were sometimes I felt there was too much input from people; for instance, it took us a long time to decide on our initial idea because everyone was so keen to throw in their ideas that it was hard to move on from. Other clashes we had were just small things, people preferring to do it a certain way, whether it was the movement of the camera or the way that the scripts were written up. But if the only problems that we had was that everyone wanted to contribute too much then I think we did pretty well as a team.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the valuable lessons I’m learning is that, in order to make things run smoother and more efficiently, sometimes you have to learn to bite your tongue and get on with the task at hand, otherwise you’ll be going around in circles all day discussing what slogan a character should have on their T-shirt.

I have to say, the same thing goes for participation, we all understood that we had separate lives to live, work was a major thing we had to work around but we all did extremely well to make it to meetings and the shoots when we could. After our consult on Monday we had our own separate meeting, which everyone attended as much as they could. We had full days of shooting and editing that people gave up their weekends for. There is no stand out from this group, because we were all on the same page as to what we needed to get done. I’d like to commend my teammates: Niamh, Trent, Darcy, Nat and Jen for an excellent effort and a great result.

Statement of Intention

For the final studio exhibition we were asked to set up a few things, this would count to our final mark. When the brief came out there were 3 major things that we needed to do: a 1 minute screener for the presentation reel, a compilation of our finished work and a blog to scroll through our various work. As there were 3 tasks and 3 media students in our group we figured it was fair for everyone to take on one of these tasks. Because I had created the trailers for the presentation in week 12 we agreed that I should create the 1 minute screener. So its now my job to recut my two trailers together to create one screener: the trailers run for 50 seconds each so I have to shave off 40 seconds in order to reach the allotted time.

We did talk about perhaps cutting a completely new video and to make it more of an explanation however in talking with Paul we agreed that we should keep the idea of using the trailers, we were told that we should try and make it as exciting as we can because we have to captivate an audience that may not be the most captivated. Basically as long as people could see that we were looking at Genre our footage looked great it would be fine.

Heres hoping.

Second Presentation

So once again we split things up evenly, we decided that we were going to let our videos talk for most of it. We scripted the video to run for 9 minutes which left 6 minutes of talking. Luckily we had 6 group members so it was easy to do the math. we talked for one minute each on different topics and stages through our project. It was my job to introduce the subject and recall for everyone what we were doing and where we left off. Although a not very informative speech we all agreed it was necessary to have that introductory speech.

The rest of the speech went really well! people seemed to enjoy the footage and we got a few giggle during the appropriate places. All in all it was a job well done.

One thing that I was really excited for was to see everyone else presentation, to see where everyone else got to, its the competitive spirit inside of me. I wasn’t disappointed, there was plenty of talent there! It seemed that the rockumentary was a common genre that people were playing around with and to some really different effects! I only wish that I could’ve been a part of all of the projects just to see how everyone else was working, compare to our group to see who had the better way of doing things, not because I want to be better but because I’m always looking for ways to better myself.

Trailer 2

With the second Trailer I tried to make it more informative without having the rely on my narrating the whole thing. I used the footage and audio that was taken on the second day of shooting from Jack, who was the lead on the mockumentary genre. Cutting together her dialogue with titles helped explain the story a bit more. The main problem I have with this is it makes Jack seem like the main character of the series when in reality each character is the main character in their respective episodes. However I don’t know how I could’ve used dialogue from other character without making it sound too incoherent and messy.

One problem I had with the editing was trying to make the two different cameras that we used look similar enough. We decided to change camera for a number of stylistic reasons which made sense at the time however without the context it looks sloppy. Because the cuts are fairly quick I’m hoping that it mostly goes unnoticed.

explanation Trailer:

Trailer 1

Judging by the trailer you might’ve guessed, I opted to create 2 trailers. Why? because there was so much footage that I wanted to show off and it would’ve just dragged on if it was in the one. So I created a teaser trailer, one which doesn’t really tell you a whole lot about the plot and the other one is a more in depth trailer with the audio of Jack explaining the plot line to camera.

I know throughout this project I hadn’t really had a big chance to show off my creativeness so I decided that this was my chance to play the genre game. With the teaser trailer I decided not to go for a genre that we already had within the show so I went for a drama/action genre. This was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed trying to make everything as tense and exciting as I could in the editing. the music definitely helped with this; using a rhythmic fast paced percussion track, I was able to edit the footage in time giving it quite a professional feel. I drew from a lot of inspiration; trailers such as Batman the Dark night and Inception were some of my main influences when constructing this trailer.

Teaser Trailer:

Re: Worries for Editing

I thought this might be a good opportunity to address some of the worries I had going into editing about the way we conducted our shoot.

The main concerns being the:
– quality of the footage with the camera that we were using (focus)
– The quality of the audio
– Being able to easily navigate to audio whilst editing

The footage came out really well! for the most part the footage was definitely usable, there were clips that were soft or completely out of focus but we took enough takes for there to be at least one usable/workable shot. There are certain instances where the focusing couldn’t be helped because it was such a shallow depth of field, like in the image below, only half of “Ted” and “Vincent’s” face is in focus.

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 7.13.19 PM Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 7.12.53 PM

 

The audio was a big problem! It turns out that the lapel microphones were very faulty and wouldn’t record anything! so there are a few files of nothing mixed in with the rest; the only usable audio came from the boom. Luckily they were all grouped so one take was in one folder which had 4 audio tracks in them. This did make it marginally easier to sort through the audio tracks however it was still a hassle opening up the audio tracks to listen for the markers instead of being able to just read it on the still image of the footage. Alas we didn’t do that, next time I will try and be more adamant that we need to add the audio roll to the marker!

This isn’t the end of the world though and we seem to be coping well enough so I shall continue to soldier on.

Editing The Trailer

So we decided as a group to go the way we’ve alway gone when dividing up tasks and that was for every body to take responsibility for their own genre. As has been noted several times before, I don’t have a genre that I’m looking after so it made sense that I was to cut together a trailer to show off the series as a whole. Originally I thought it would be better to wait for everyone else to finish their editing, that way I could use their already edited footage, keeping the correct colour and the correct mood for the genre. Very quickly I realised that this would leave me at a big disadvantage as I was totally dependant on everyone else finishing theirs and giving me enough time. So I decided to create a trailer from scratch.

We had gotten a class on how to set out your editing and workspace so I tried to keep to that as much as possible. It seemed like a lot of ground work for some peace of mind but I can understand the reasoning behind it. We were to create new sequence every time we wanted to do something different, that way we would have a record of where we came from. I have to admit it is hard to keep it in your mind, its a bit like clicking the save button, you never can remember it until its too late.

My first step isn’t very exciting so it’s not worth much of a post but here it is anyway. I set up a sequence entitled trailer footage which was all the unedited shots I though were good enough to make it into the trailer. I ended up with about 20 minutes of footage which was a lot better than the hour and a half that we had. I chose these shots because they looked good, not because they were important to the story. There is, however, one piece of dialogue I will keep which was filmed on the second day which is the character Jack explaining to camera why they are here, basically telling the plot points of the series. My plan, as it stands at the moment is use that dialogue under the other images to create an exciting and insightful trailer.

You can see my first attempts at editing a trailer below:

 

Screen Shot 2015-10-20 at 3.01.29 pm

Editing Exercise

So we have finished out filming and it looks really good, really proud of the shots and everyone involved! in our consult we were asked to do a colour correction exercise to start us off. Even though I do love editing, I use Final Cut Pro instead of the program that we were asked to use which is Premiere Pro. Although they’re similar the small differences have been enough to trip me up and is just more time consuming.  Although the tools are different I figured the outcome should be the same so with that in mind and my past experience I set to work on colour correcting the clip that I chose. I didn’t choose the clip for any other reason than I liked it.

In the video you’ll see 4 clips each with different colouring, I tried not to be too gentle with the colour so that you could really see the difference and it would be easier what kind of mood a certain colour gives to the shot.

The first clip is is the footage that has come straight out of the DSLR – no colour correction.
(because its a DSLR the image is already compressed which means it looks good from the start but its difficult to edit the image because there isn’t as much information and range – worth noting when watching the clips)

The second clip I was going for a darker horror vibe, even though the dialogue doesn’t suit the genre I think with this colouring and the appropriate music this shot could come out very sinister!

The third clip is green, because I wanted to try something different, however upon looking at this shot I can see why not many films use green as their filter because it looks pretty awful. I can see how you might use it to your advantage, if a character was meant to be looking or feeling sick.

The final clip is almost a sepia looking filter, the cliche would be an old western but I feel that the fairly flat colouring could lend itself well to the noir genre that we’re exploring as it would let the shadows stand out more than the original footage would.