New Idea - Speed Dating

After struggling to think of ideas for which direction to take the mockumentary style film, I decided that it was going to be particularly difficult to actually create something that would use documentary style camera shots and a blockbuster style plot and story line.

Therefore, I have devised a new idea, one that I can plan out to how I want it to look.

My new idea will roll with the working title of 'Speed Dating'.

GENRE:
Rom-com, with realism-style camera shots, close-ups and hand-held cameras.

MOOD:
Light hearted, with a relatively serious message behind it (much like a lot of rom-coms).

STORY:

Jessica unlucky in love, and has not had good experience with past relationships. After deliberating with her best friend, and seeing an advert for a speed dating event, she decides to give speed dating a go. She meets some unforgetable characters, some forgetable ones and she also meets two people who stick in her mind. She spends time with both, and falls for the wrong man, the one who doesn't treat her as he should and then eventually she realises who she would rather be with.

I think that this is particularly conventional for rom-coms, for example The Holiday, where women characters are struggling to find the person who they really like.

Levi-Strauss and Barthes

Levi Strauss: (taken from Nick Lacey's Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts In Media Studies.)

Claude Levi-Strauss was a French anthropologist who argued that films follow the rule of binary oppositions.

Good - Bad
Heroes - Villains
Helpers - Henchmen
Princesses (love objects) - Sirens (sexual objects)
Magicians - Sorcerers
Donors of magic objects - Preventer/hinderers of donors
Dispatchers of heroes - Captors of heroes
Seekers - Avoiders
Seeming villains who are good - False heroes/heroines who are evil.

Claude Levi-Strauss also argued that the opposites can be found through the looks of the hero and the villain, the hero tends to be good looking and the villain is normally ugly or deformed.

Barthes:

Describes a text as being; "a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can read, they are indeterminable...the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language..." (S/Z - 1974 translation found on http://www.mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/narrative.html).

This means that a text is a jumbled mess, that needs to be sorted out in order to see things clearly, to understand it and appreciate what it is telling us.

Barthes believed in Narrative Codes, such as:
The Enigma Code - asking questions or waiting for information.
Symbols and Signs.
Points of Cultural Reference.
Simple Description/reproduction.

Barthes' enigma code introduces a mystery or a puzzle into the narrative, and then eventually the plot unravels the mystery and everything is revealed. However, in some cases, the mystery is not revealed entirely, like the film Premonition starring Sandra Bullock, where the film ends leaving some questions unanswered.

Genre - Comedy

Typical Conventions

Most typically a 'hybrid genre' such as an action-comedy, a horror-comedy or a romantic-comedy (rom-com). These different hybrids tend to have different styles of comedy:

Action-Comedy: Slapstick humour, with one or two protagonists constantly falling, fighting or having unlikely accidents. Most Jim Carrey films are like this, such as Yes Man and Fun with Dick and Jane.

Horror-Comedy: These films tend to have a distinct tone of black comedy, a bleak sense of humour that an audience find funny even though it is not immediately obvious what the joke is. The Scary Movie films and Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead have this type of comedy that proves to be a success with audiences.

Rom-Coms: The most popular type of comedy hybrid, aimed at a primarily female audience, but also young adult males can enjoy this type of film. These comedies can include types of comedy found in other films, such as slap-stick and black comedy, but Rom-Coms like to use sharp tongued whit and clever lines to produce an amusing story line or film. Furthermore, the situations that the protagonists often find themselves in can also be amusing on their own. Hugh Grant is a typical actor in this kind of film, evident in Notting Hill with Julia Roberts, who has a new Rom-Com out this year, Eat Pray Love.

Comedy is an audience-pleaser, with most of the story-lines being simple and easy to follow. Comedy films appeal to a wide range of people, not just a particular age group or gender, which is possibly one of the reasons as to why they do so well. However, because so many are made, a lot of them are over-looked, or don't do as well as they should do, because there simply are so many circulating around at one time. This can prove difficult for distributors and film makers alike.