Intro
The Humor project was our final project in English. Since it was the end of the year, we could let lose and have fun with our project. Our challenge was to create a humorous project. This could be a funny advertisement, podcast, skit, or visual art like a comic strip.
To prepare, our class read Slaughterhouse 5, a satire written by Kurt Vonnegut. We studied the different types of humor he used in his work, such as satire, dark humor, blue humor, and irony. Then we had to analyze 2 comedians of our choice. This was fun because we got to watch our favorite stand up comics or favorite scenes from movies. I chose to analyze a scene from the Office and a scene from Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Click the thumbnail on the right to read my humorist analysis of these two works as well as the proposal of my humor project.
I was in a group of 4 people – Eva, Ayan, Will, and myself. We were all film students. Eva, Ayan, and I made a mockumentary together in our junior film class and we wanted to recreate it to see how much our filmmaking skills had grown. Will was a new addition to our group and we had a lot of fun filming and coming up with the idea.
The Process
We had some trouble coming up with ideas. We knew we wanted to make a mockumentary but we didn’t know what we wanted it to be about. We eventually went back to our roots and made a mockumentary of ourselves. The idea was a group of students making their final film at Freestyle.
Then, we wrote a script. It wasn’t as professional as the screenplays we wrote in film class, and everything was compiled into one document with as the ideas, filming schedule, and actual script. However, I think this fit the tone of the project and we had fun writing it.
We were inspired by sitcoms like the Office and Parks and Rec. Also, we took inspiration from individual comedians like Nick Kroll. Most importantly, we drew on our own experiences in Freestyle and the struggles and joys of working with each other.
Final Product
Watch the video below to view our final mockumentary, titled “This is Freestyle Academy”
Reflection
I think this was a good end to English and a relatively easy and fun project to wind down after the big Worldbuilding unit. I liked working with my friends one last time Reflecting on my English class experience as a whole, it was definitely the best English class I’ve ever taken and I learned to be more creative and more thoughtful in my writing.