Video Joke Project

Summary:
As a group, we picked a joke out of a list of ten and had to write a 2-3 minute script of how the joke was going to be told. After we chose our two favorite scripts, we had to then make a 2-3 minute movie telling the story of the joke. The genres we chose to film were Film Noir and Buddy Movie.


I was the editor for Le Bar and the camera operator for What's Your Number?.


Le Bar 

What's Your Number?

Comparison
First off, the main affinity between the videos is that we were trying to tell the same joke. The contrast is shown in the way the scripts are written, and how we tried to get each joke across. Le Bar went for a film noir feel, and had a narrator help keep the story going. What’s Your Number?, on the other hand, was present day and dealt with an internal thought process instead. We felt that both videos did a good job of telling the joke and that they were both successful. The scripts chosen for both jokes were also didactic; they were very straightforward and gave the audience all the information they needed to know. If we didn’t have the narrator or internal thought process then the audience would have needed to do a lot more thinking on their own, and in a 2-3 minute video, we weren’t sure if we would’ve gotten our joke across as well. 

Le Bar consistently tried to manipulate line, shape, and rhythm, while What’s Your Number? manipulated space and movement. In Le Bar, we used both active and virtual lines. The male character was constantly looking at the femme fatale, which created virtual lines in their eyesight. Actual lines in the booth, the pool table, the bar and the horizon line created different senses of power between the two characters. We also used rhythm in the type of shots created consistently in the video; this created a sense of distance between the characters, so the audience would get the feeling that they weren’t going to be together in the end. In What’s Your Number?, we used movement to keep only one or two characters moving throughout the frame at a time, so that they were the sole focus of the shot. To manipulate space we used a variety of types of shots (WS, MS, CU) to create focus, as well as using the rule of thirds, the 180º rule, as well as the rule of 30 in order to change how the space was perceived.