Sketch – Make up tutorial

With make-up tutorials being a rising and popular example of online video, we thought this genre would be a fun and relevant example to parody for project three. For this sketch, we parodied the genre by subverting expectations of the original format. In a typical make-up tutorial, each step usually includes or is followed by a shot of a model’s or the instructor’s face, demonstrating how each step should look and how the overall effect is taking place. Instead of showing a different shot for each step though, we reused to same shot for each, rendering this process pointless as the viewer is never able to see the effect of the make-up. This also contradicts the dialogue that accompanies the video, which comments on how the look is evolving and how you’ll be able to see the look take effect with each step. The humour comes from these contradictions and how this one small factor can render the tutorial pointless, despite the fact that structurally it maintains most of its original elements. The new style of video that this sort of hybrid of instructional video and comedy (through the use of parody)  has created consequently has a new narrative form, as it has been moved out of being purely instructional, however it hasn’t necessarily been pushed out of its non-narrative structure. The anti-climax of the ‘final look’ at the end (being exactly the same look as the repeated shots, but with a hat) edges the video closer to being narrative in form, however the cause and effect structure isn’t quite there, despite the video’s changes in style. It actually has become quite difficult to place the video, as it no longer carries with it the instructional elements that caused it to be non-narrative, nor does the misleading dialogue or anti-climax do quite enough to result in it a narrative structure.

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