CW: Narratives In Party Off

Our film, Party Off!, is a romantic comedy it takes inspiration from many different romantic comedies, including Love Actually and Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. We have taken guidance from both these films and also from the narrative theories that we have looked at; throughout our film and its opening these narrative themes will be set up.

Narrative Enigma:

In our film we plan to use narrative enigma. We hope to be able to keep the look of the main character a secret. In order to do this, but still make sure it is clear that she is the main character we will have her voice first, as the voice over. When we do introduce her we will show her coming back up after clearly being sick, we plan to have her look as unglamorous as we can, by having her cry before hand and have her mascara running, to make this obvious.

This choice was made after reflecting upon the opening sequence of Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason. In this one of the early shots of Bridget, who has previously been set up as the main character, is of her about to jump out of a plane. We thought through what the director was creating with this shot and figured that it was to establish some form of relate-ability between the character and the audience, the fact that Bridget is no seen as glamorous all the time makes her, as a character, more relatable.

Todorov’s Structure:

We will follow Todorov’s narrative structure, but not strictly. We will create the starting equilibrium through the scrapbook, showing the happy times before the start of the film and, through the scrapbook, we will move towards the disequilibrium. By having a pre-established equilibrium that is only touched upon through the starting sequence we are somewhat mirroring Love Actually. The characters in Love Actually have a back story proceeding the events of the start of the movie; we pick this up through the start of the opening and throughout the film. By having the equilibrium pre-established we save time in the opening, meaning we can include more content within it.

Propp’s Archetypes:

We do not have many of Propp’s character archetypes. This is because, throughout the examples we have looked at and through our research we have not seen many examples where a Romantic Comedy contained these characters.

The link that we have been able to make, however, to Propp’s archetypes is between the main character, which we have seen is comparable to the hero, mainly because they commonly get the prize/prince/princess. We have also found a comparison to the villain, a commonly occurring character that often tries to steal the prize, they are also somewhat comparable to the false hero. Finally, we have found links to the helper, we originally thought that they could be the friends. We have not been able to find links to the donor or dispatcher.

Binary Opposition:

The most common and obvious binary opposition that we have seen is between the main character and their love interest. In all our examples and almost all Romantic Comedies the two are male and female. There are not many other binaries that we have noticed.

In our film, we plan to also have the binary opposition between the love interest and the main character. We have also made a binary opposition between the main character and her friend. The friend will be a popular, sporty and a stereotypical cheerleader type person whereas the main character will be unpopular, dorky and stereotypically nerdy. This will create conflict, naturally, later on in the film.

Who Would Watch A Rom Com?

Conventionally we are targeting a teen audience as this is where most Rom-Coms are aimed at, however we also noticed from further research that they are also targeted at people who are in a long term relationship or marriage which reduces the chances of it being a teen audience therefore it is good to target a secondary audience that being 24-35.


However we think it is wiser to stick to a target audience we can relate to and know what they like than be adventurous and not produce a film that is as good.


For this we think our idea we need to aim at a teenage market at someone who may enjoy things like Wild Child, however we also think it is important to remember our indie background so it is important not to over aspire therefore we looked Submarine to take ideas from that and look at a film that was digitally produced. 

Rough Cut 1 [working title party off]

our first rough cut for party off. 

Final Cut Pro X (PT3)

Since my last post on Final Cut Pro we have learnt how to make our clips more organised so they are not all spread out where they can become lost and become untidy. Therefore we were shown on final cut how to make tags onto our clips to make them easier to find as they would become catergorised and therefore organised. We made the tags in accordance to where we had filmed them and the characters that were in the scenes. 

we also learnt how to layer things below using clips so you get the same sound but the clip cant be seen which can be very useful if you cant record the sound of your own that you want or you cant import one from the library on final cut but you do have a sound of your own that you like but its the wrong clip for the scene. 

 we also learnt how to layer things like what you can see in the shot here. ----->

Sound: Key Conventions Observed So Far....

Whilst researching films for my genre (Rom-Com). we started to notice a recurring in the music chosen.

The music usually has a pop theme or contains some sort of wind instrument, percussion like a piano with a guitar or other string instrument. which fits nicely with the happy theme that usually runs with a rom com film.

Target Audience Research

The Guardian 

This article shows that although rom coms often get thrashed by the critics the audience still enjoyed them, we felt this was important.

It's also the latest in a long line of contemporary romantic comedies – proving that no matter how progressive we imagine we have become, our dating aspirations remain rooted in centuries-old tradition.

The Guardian

This shows that Rom-Coms are popular with couples especially around valentines day. But now this is changing.

Reviews were scathing, but ensemble romcom Valentine's Day has finally ended. 

Telegraph


Although critics complain sometimes there is nothing better than watching a rom-com. Although the formula is the same and can become repetitive and this is what the critics don't like, however for some people its the best thing - this is the audience we want to target.

I think it is this sense of how comforting movies can be that critics sometimes miss. 

Watching About Time is like being given a big hug, and it is a very nice sensation. 

Marley + Me ( a romantic comedy where everyone is in love with the dog) can reduce me to a helpless happy blubber, and every time Notting Hill is on television (which is surprisingly often) I find myself compelled to watch it, and even mire compelled to sob at the "I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her" line. I know its corny, but it doesn't matter. It works its magic every time.

Romcoms tend to defy such rigorous critique.

Richard Curtis is the Mrs Miniver of our times, though rather wittier. His films fulfil the same function of making Britain seem a good place, full of nice people.  

The Guardian

Romantic comedies seem to take over where the fairytales of childhood left off, feeding our dreams of a soulmate;

Now, hot on the heels of It's Complicated, Crazy, Stupid, Love offers further proof that the romcom, rather than desert we middle-lifers, has decided to mature with us. In the US, 64% of the opening weekend audience was female and 71% were over 25. Not that our aspirations have changed much, judging by this script. We still want our hero and heroine to convince us that a stroll into the sunset and beyond is the most likely outcome of initial adversity.

And it is still heroes and heroines we're talking about; despite homosexuality long ago entering the cultural mainstream, a single-sex relationship has yet to be the full focus of a mainstream romance, unless you count Brokeback Mountain where, I believe, the comedy was unintentional; or Mel Gibson and Danny DeVito. "When Harry Met Henry" and "When Sally Met Sarah" are long overdue, and this only confirms how conventional the rules of engagement are when it comes to the romantic comedy genre. Today's cinema audience may be more cynical (and sexually active) than that of our parents but they still demand that verbal foreplay lead to physical consummation, and misunderstandings to love with a capital L. In the world of the romantic comedy, life hasn't changed much since the 1950s.

Ironically for a movie category not renowned for its originality or inventiveness, it's the one arena where women have been allowed to be feisty way before feminism made it de rigueur.

Since so many romantic comedies vary little in their storyline, the success or failure of such movies depends largely on whether we believe in the relationship of the protagonists.

Jezebel.com

Back in the good old days, all a Hollywood studio had to do to make tens of millions of dollars was release a film about a plucky, satisfyingly flawed female protagonist who finds quirky but ultimately bland love with a chesty yet tender-hearted man. Meet-cute, But I Can't Stand Him montage, scene where Everything Changes, infatuation montage, misunderstanding that threatens to derail the whole thing, dramatic gesture to correct misunderstanding, satisfying resolution. Boom. A Rom Com. But over the last few years, box office receipts have been disappointing. Hollywood execs say that audiences are sick of romantic comedy tropes, that the formula is tired. But women aren't tired of the romantic comedy formula at all; what we're tired of is films made by people who don't understand what female viewers want. And we've finally got other options.

The problem isn't that audiences are bored or that technology ruined everything; the problem is that there aren't enough people in Hollywood who understand why women watch romantic comedies making movies — there aren't enough women. Last year, only 18% of directors, writers, executive producers, producers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 grossing box office films were women, a 1% increase since 1998. That's fucking embarrassing. And women want to watch movies; the god-awful Twilight franchise has grossed over a billion dollars, a mostly-female audience is nerding the fuck out on The Hunger Games. Brave, Les Miserables, and Silver Linings Playbook kicked ass in the 2012 box office. There's a gigantic opportunity to snag more female viewers by simply releasing a halfway decent romcom that doesn't depict women as psychopathic brides.

The romantic comedy is very much alive. It just needs to be made by people who understand why the romantic comedy audience watches. Romantic comedies need to be made by ... women. And with an ever-growing class of talented and funny female comedy writers currently working in TV, maybe the next architect of the romantic comedy of Hollywood's dreams has been right in front of it this whole time. If they'd only notice.

Millions of girls turn 13 ever year. Even if people discarded film genres once they caught onto their tropes, studio execs could figure that they've got at least 3 solid years of earnest romcom viewing from most young women before they catch on to the fact that every film is the same.

Researching Rom-Coms

I watched this video as it shared my genre of rom-com i liked the fact that they used interesting titles, such as the cheerio box and the steam from the mirror, we can see from the series of shots that the guy in the film is late, this is signified by him rushing about and swearing as well as making mistakes due to carelessness we also get the impression that he is quite disorganised as he leaves his book and ultimately he is late as he gets up late for what we presume is work. This is also signified by the suit with a crisp white shirt tie and black shoes as well as a briefcase. Towards the end of the film we see he falls over a stereotypical action performed by actors to make the character look inferior.

Things I will take from this:

interesting titles

Things I will learn from:

Continuity editing - at times it became jumpy and were different speeds in which the actor performed but editing could have helped improve this.




Although this opening didn't directly link to my chosen genre I think it works as it is a romantic drama which in someways still has a lot in common. From this video we have an impression that it is old due to the pixelated footage and because it is in black and white, the clothes that the girl is wearing are not typically from this generation also signifying that it is old, in addition the music is slow with slow notes played on a piano this suiting the moment and the opening perfectly. We move on a couple of shots and find there is a man standing with an army uniform but not one that is recent so still signifying its an old war so possible ww2. If the man standing there was her husband she would run up to him but se doesn't instead she walks slow possibly connoting the fact she is going to receive bad news which in the end she does, as she find out that her husband has died.

Things I will take from this:

The use of appropriate music
Wide range of shots
Narrative enigma as we do not see the soldiers face

Things I will learn from this:

Lack of titles
black and white - if he/she wanted to show it older they could have used sepia to create a better effect





I Liked this rom-com opening because I liked the way they have used interesting titles which personally i think are better than the ones I saw in the first opening as these are more refined 

Practise Shoot

This is a practise shoot of the scrapbook to see how it would work when using the scrapbook in the film. Seeing how long it would take and also see how it would look and fit with the full film idea.

Additional Rom-Com Research

Search

This is what we typed in to google to get our research it brought up 2,670,000 items.




Sky Movies

We looked at the top box office films that had made a good profit.

BoxOfficeMojo

we looked at recent box office hits and the earliest one with the highest box office hit was Silver Linings Playbook (2012)  which was rated number 12 

Submarine


we thought it was appropriate to research products that were like ours and look at submarine (ayoade, 2010) we thought this was interesting film to research as it showed us a digitally produced film that was produced on a small scale budget.


About Time


We thought it was also a good idea to compare it to efforts from working title another 'british' film company however this one had a larger budget therefore better quality etc. And therefore something we could aspire to.

Mise-en-scene Vodcast

This is our mis-en-scene for our film party off to show our ideas for how we are going to portray the characters without using words.

Anamatic

Our anamatic for our film Party off.

Idea3

For the opening scene I hope to change this from the original idea and have it more as an arty piece by converting the original idea from a photo album into a scrapbook idea, because this emphasises her arty and therefore nerdy side. 

film poster

The scrapbook would still be filled with the same pictures but other things like train tickets and music festival wristband etc. 

However unlike in my other posts the titles would be intergrated into the scrapbook like we see for example in napoleon dynamite and to some extent in angus thongs and perfect snogging. 

This will lead onto  some of the images in the scrapbook will seem to 'come alive' turning into flash backs of her efforts to get her love interest for the rest of the opening. 
As i hope to create a love triangle between 2 best friends and a guy. And then this to cause conflict therefore creating tension etc.

Storyboard

These pictures demonstrate our storyboard for our film Party Off.

Screenplay

Our screenplay for party off.