The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 4: Humor)

There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:

Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

I'll be featuring the humor genre for this post. The point of using humor in a commercial is to associate fun, laughter, and happiness with a product. But writing a humorous script is hard. What seems funny on paper doesn't always translate to film, and sometimes what doesn't seem funny on paper translates to comedy gold. There were three examples of this genre this year.

The first commercial was very much of a collaborative effort from the class. The author had an idea of what he wanted; someone had origami and everyone was chasing him to get it. It reminded me of this guy...

I asked the kids to come up with scenarios for this script, and they created about ten. Several of the scenarios weren't doable, but they were all great. 

The author of the next commercial was one of the only students in the class this year to set out and write a pure comedy. The technical challenge for this commercial is that it called for a green screen for the ground, instead of for the background in order to simulate a hole. This was the last commercial that we filmed then, since we took the green screen down and put it outside on the ground on a very windy day. You can catch glimpses of it in some of the close-ups. I don't have a tripod, so the camera is not as steady as it needed to be. 

The author of this last featured commercial wanted to write a commercial in the genre of "Extreme Action." However she also wanted the background in the final scene to be programmed in Scratch, with a cartoon helicopter coming in with a cartoon pilot. To me this switched the genre. I took the music from Super Mario Bros. 2 and some sound effects from Pacman to compliment the Scratch programming.