A Level Portfolio Project. Day 6: The science + smiling

 RICK AND MORTY

    There is a bit of shame in me when I admit that this show has undeniably changed a lot of my humor, altough to be fair it also kind of changed humor in television. Rick and Morty is a beloved sci fi comedy adult animated tv show that airs on Adult Swim. The show follows Rick, the smartest man in the universe, and his grandson Morty, a typical 14 year old middle schooler, the two go on adventures, yada yada yada, you likely know all of this, you likely also know about the show's absurdist style of comedy, and altough these days people think the show is edgy and obssessed with itself, I can't deny it's influence on me. This particular kind of absurdism where characters won't question bizarre things and where horribly messed up things will happen around the characters, things that if they were to happen to someone on any other TV show it would leave them traumatized or at least partially scared are just put in as throw away jokes.

    One of the most iconic gags in the show is on episode 8 season 4, "vat of acid." In this episode Rick makes Morty a device which can save a specific period of time and take it's user back to it like loading a save file in a video game or like in the finale of futurama before HULU made the 2 most forgettable seaons of television since arrested development. Now when Morty gets the device instead of showing what he does with it were shown a montage of him using it. At first Morty does all the typical things youi'd expect a 14 year old boy to do, asking his crush out, stealing a car, trying every free sample at an ice cream place, that kind of thing. Until eventually the montage's loud and exciting music turns nice and calm and we see Morty, the usually timid and awkard lame 14 year old, suddenly gets the confidence to hold the door open for a random girl. The two hit it off and the montage now turns into a cliche, cutesy, love montage, there is no dialogue, we're just shown the two falling in love for each other, until their relationship starts to sour and the two nearly break up, again all of this is still in a montage. Eventually Morty apologizes and tries to sweeten the relationship by getting the two of them a flight to some vacation place. The montage continues until it again is completely turned around as the plane the two are on crashes into the artic. The two survive the crash and have to do what they can to keep surviving, lighitng fires, huddling up, eating vegan leather shoes (which is a great visual gag), and eventually eating other passanger. Morty looks at the device and realizes he can go back to right before the two met and save them from this hell, but he doesn't, he knows that was months ago and he'd lose the woman he loves so he ventures high up a mountain to try and get a signal and call for help. Now the montage shifts again to be somewhat more emotional and heroic as we are shown Morty's trek, nearly dying several times until eventually he reaches the top and just barely calls 911 before fainting. Suddenly, we cut to the hospital, the music becomes cheery and the two have survived. Morty's family throws the two a welcome back party, and while they are all watching the TV Morty's idiot father Jerry reaches for the control remote, accidentally grabbing the device and turning time all the way back to before Morty met this girl to which he tries aimlessly explaining to her what had happened and being pepper sprayed, the music switching back to the one playing at the very start of the montage.

    Now I spent a lot of time explaning that montage because it's genius. This relationship or this girl are never mentioned again in the episode or the show, the only reason it's in there from a story perspective is to give Morty a reason to get tired of the device and return it to Rick, thereby moving the plot along. Plus in the actual show Rick and Morty much more bizarre things happen to Morty than him being trapped in the Artic and his genius, space traveling grandpa not being able to find him after he crashes into the artic would normally be a plot hole, however you don't question it here because of how absurd it is, it's more absurd for the audience that the characters act like people and go on normal people adventures, not like the wacky sci-fi characters they are. This kind of humor which makes reality seem absurd speaks to me in volumes, I love it and WILL be incorperating it to my short.

SMILING FRIENDS

Smiling Friends seems like a good thing to pair Rick and Morty with, both being Adult Swim cartoons with a similar style of comedy that took over audiences for it's style of comedy never seen before in television. Smiling friends also has characters acting completely normal in bizarre scenerios. However while in Rick and Morty the absurdism came in how wacky the characters and the world they were in is the comedy in Smiling Friends comes from how normal the main characters are in comparison to the world they live in and everyone around them. The Smiling Friends work for a company that helps people smile but the office they work at - despite it being a giant yellow smiley face - has a normal, semi bleak-looking break room where our characters wait wasting time for their next job. Characters like Charlie will often just talk the insane wacky characters they try and help smile like a regular human would, he's the straight-man but where the straight-man would be weirded out and confused by the silly events happening around him, Charlie sees everything as normal, they're world being naturally weird..

A Level Portfolio Project. Day 5: The squad + strangelove

CRUELTY SQUAD

 Now if you're feeling the strangest wave of deja vu upon reading the title for the video game "Cruelty Squad" it might just come from my portfolio project from last year where I talked a bit about it. The game takes place in the far future where the evils of big companies and consumerism has turned the world into a shithole, people rummage the streets shooting people and facing no consequences, everyone you interact with is incredibly hostile, and all aesthetics have completely vanished leaving all clothes, streets, art, and symbols looking like a pile of rainbow vomit as consumers will buy anything thats sold with a big and vibrant logo.

    You play as an empty fuck (that being the play on words of his name: MT Foxtrot) who is hired to work for a gigantic company called Cruelty Squad who's purpose is in assastinating figured deemed contriversial. This ranges from killing people who have thrown away money that Cruelty Squad invested into them in cheap "chunkopops" to a assassinating a politician who wants to pass an incredibly extremeist and contreversial legislature dictating that trillionaires be taxed 1%. There's a level that has you be hired by three up-and-coming billionaires to exterminate their recently retired father so he doesn't throw away their inheritence and another level that has a very popular eugenics company's board of shareholders hiring you to kill the company's CEO as he has been missing on work due to burnout.

    What cruelty squad gets right is that it's not afraid to pull any punches. It knows that the best way to deliver it's anti-consumerist it needs to be as grotesque as possible with its imagery, to the point where  some audiences would definietley be turned off from it. It's honestly an idea that has shaped how I think about the art I one day hope to make.

DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB

    You and me? Yeah, we're gonna meet again, not sure where or honestly even when, but for sure when we meet again, it's gonna be bright as the BOMB. Wanna hear a joke? Ok so, the cold war, the Yanks send a nuke on accident to the Ruskies and they can't pull it back, and the Ruskies, they get so scared they send a missile to explode the plane with the nuke, but the missile only scrapes the ship, now eventually the Yanks get the code they need to bring the ship around they try to send it to the pilot, but the communications broke, why? FROM THE MISSILE! Hilarious I'm aware.

    Dr. Strangelove looks at the absurdity of the nuclear arms race and chooses to laugh as there is not much else one could have done, it points at the people in charge of our country and characterises them as childish, moronic, reactionaries, and actual nazi's who were hired by the government operation-paper-clip style. The whole movie has many sexual undertones, starting with an image of a ship docking on top of another before adding its "tube" into it and pumping it with gas, later on the movie ends with the titular Dr. Strangelove getting so excited about his ideal dystopian future that his arm erects into a sieg heil in what is definietley a raunchy innuendo for something I'm probably not aware of. 

    Kubrick combines all of the era's paranoia and cynicism of knowing you weren't in control of your fate and chooses to laugh at the icompetance of those in power. I have similar cynicism for religion and how people are unable to understand those who want to stray off of it so I'm definietley putting a bit of personal angst into my short.

    

A Level Portfolio Project. Day 4: The 'saac + substance

 THE BINDING OF ISAAC

    I grew up watching people play The Binding Of Isaac and now that im older I watch myself play as the previously mentioned Isaac. It's one of my favorite video games ever made, I think I have about 1000 hours on it and I could honestly do 1000 more, hell after I'm done with this I'll likely go and play it. As you can likely gather from the title, TBOI take great inspiration from christianity, being a light retelling of the abraham story, one important as it explores the idea of faith. While the original has Abraham, a worshipper of god being told by said god to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to him, thereby showing his devotions, the game has Isaac living in a small house on a hill with his mother who watches christian broadcasts on the television, until one day god gives her the command to strip away all his clothes, toys, and drawings and to lock him in room, eventually telling her to sacrifice him and show his devotion. Now where the original story has god stepping in at the last second and telling Abraham "hey it was all a prank :P," telling him to sacrifice a lamb instead, the game has isaac finding a trapdoor in his room and espcaping into the basement. where he know needs to fight his way through a giant maze full of monsters, items, and trauma. All of the items and monsters in the game being based off of either Isaac's past trauma, or of religion.

    Now, that's all pretty fucked up, but the comedy element comes in the fact that the game is all meant to take place in a child's mind, Isaac is actually just imagining that he is having an adventure, so you have a lot of very silly material that fills the game. One reoccuring piece of imagery in the game is that of poop, poop is actually a reoccuring piece of imagery in every videogame by the developer, Edmund Mcmillen, who's made a lot of beloved indie classics, classics that do in fact feature a lot of poop. There are items based off of poop, enemies based off of poop, poop bosses, poop obstacles, a whole character in the game is based off of throwing literal shit at his enemies, however once you unlock that enemy you start to realize there is a dark side as to why you see so many references to the brown stuff (if you dont mind me calling it that). See Isaac's mom never went into his room and ended his life, he likely tought it would happen and went to hide in his toy chest, and in there he suffocated to death while comforting himself with stories and adventures, which is what the actual game is. The chracter you unlock is called by the game's community as "Blue Baby," being a reference to one of Mcmillen's old games, the character is just a blue version of Isaac with X's in his eyes and you find him laying inside of a giant chest, the implication is that this is you playing as a blue, suffocated Isaac, and the reason you throw shit at your adversaries is because of the myth that once you die you shit your pants. The reason that the game is because isaac was likely thinking, right before he died, that he was going to shit himself as he was dying. Now that, is a messed-up joke.

    Now that long example I gave was just meant to give you an idea of how the game rolls, it's not scared to pull any punches and that's a big part of what I wanna bring to my story. I love the dark, depressing mood that you feel when you play though the game as if it's aware of how dark it is and it doesn't care about how uncomfortable that makes the audience, it leaves you to just instinctivley laugh, almost as if that's the only reaction you can really have. Of course those themes of religion and in how they can traumatize a child will be heavily applied to my short film, Otto's sister will have past trauma from being a lesbian and being forced to go to conversion camp. I think the way the game shows you Isaac's perspective, thereby hiding the darker truth behind it, makes the story very interesting, it forces you as an audience member to piece the pieces of his life together.

THE SUBSTANCE

I'll try to keep this one a little short.

The Substance came out in 2024 and took the world by storm, being nominated for multiple oscars, including best picture and director. Just like Isaac, it's a pretty clear metaphor for a kind of worship, not the religious kind however, but the material one. 

    The Substance picks apart at the material, patriarchal, and most times disgusting ways in which women are given and taken influence in hollywood. Demi Moore's character being a washed up celebrity who's old age has taken away her sex factor in the eyes of the industry, that is until she starts taking a (are you ready for it?) SUBSTANCE, that turns her into a young, beautiful Margret Qualley, the procedure of taking the (oh i'm gonna do it again!!!) serum eventually having some unexpected, monkey-paw effects.

    The film's dark satire is shown in the ridiculous way it goes about depicting the rich and powerful men of the industry, beggining the film by having these tight close-ups of the TV executive eating shrimp in a truly disgusting mannor, or using a urinal while making a truly inspiring face. 

    The gross-out aspects are quite funny for pretty childish reasons but they serve to depict that these men are just as gross on the outside ad they are in inside. 

    For my short I intend to have such similar chilidish yet dark humor that The Substance, and The Binding Of Isaac have.

A level portfolio project. Day 3: The stuff

     Off the bat (like one out of hell (which is quite fitting for our subject matter)) we knew what the genre was gonna be, hell I knew what the genre was gonna be before I even got in a group, my favorite genre for anything, dark or black comedy. Dark comedies are great, they make you feel like the world around you has lost it's mind while still having room to take itself seriously.

    While researching dark comedy I found this great article called What Is Dark Comedy And How To Master It, Now I have a few funny bones shaking around inside of me so I knew a lot about this, but it covers the main characteristics that make dark comedy comedic. The main thing to focus on is the social commentary aspect, something that we want to focus on heavily on our short. 

    To cut the short short, the plot will focus on a character who is power hungry giving up their humanity for control of the world through satanism, it's a pretty obvious metaphor, Otto, the main charcter, uses the power of religion to fufill her own personal desires while being manipulated by someone who wants something out of her, it's a critique of religion and of the people who see it as a means to grow their status. We'll make jokes throughout the whole thing that play into how ridiculous the situation that Otto - someone dissatisfied with her lack of power through christianity and turns to satan - is in. One joke I had in mind was having Otto putting up these ridiculous flyers with incredibly satanic imagery with text surrounding it talking about salvation of the soul and what-not.

    Not too sure what image to attach to this so I'll just put a drawing of a pentagram I made, that seems quite fitting.

 before you judge me and say that that's not what a star looks like, just know I have a serious medical condition that makes me uncapable of drawing stars. (keep this little joke of mine in mind for later)

A level portfolio project. Day 2: The Schedule

    With how often my projects are hurt by a lack of planning I'm glad that we are being required to make a schedule like this for this one. I'm glas my team and I have an idea of what the next few weeks are going to look like surrounding this project, I'm sure this schedule will make it all very easy to plan out and we'll be able to stay calm knowing whether we are on schedule or not. Here below is a schedule that was mostly written by my wonderful teammate Emi:

    

    This part is pretty self explenatory so I'll cut it quickly. We have a pretty optimistic look for the future of this project!

A level portfolio project. Day 1: The Short

 

    I've finally reached the final project in my media studies career and I know just what I want to do to finish it off. Since the start of the year I have been waiting for this moment patiently, I am going to make a short film package. My teammates this go around will be people who I've never worked with before, but we're excited to see how our mind synergize together, my teammates Emi and Andrew are both equally excited to work in the same group as I am. We knew going in that we wanted to make this something weird with a dark comedic underline, I have similar inspirations for this project that I had for my portfolio project last year so I'll likely be looking back at my last blogs to see what approach and ideas I had when I was writing that project. We know this: it's gonna be funny, it's gonna be dark (both visually and figuratively), and it's gonna star Emi wearing a fez I found in a thrift store about a month ago, simply because we think it'd be intersting.

    We do have a few ideas going around. The first idea I had for the story was about the devil hiring someone as a hitman and paying them in drugs that they would then take and use as a weapon, one idea I had would be Emi smoking something and the smoke that comes out of her mouth would become demons who would grab her target. The whole thing would have had an anti drug message as Emi's character Otto would slowly ruin her life the more she worked. Eventually I expanded this idea into a potential retelling of the Ivan the Terrible tragedy where he struck his son with a cane, blinded by his anger, and accidentally killed him, a recreation of that iconic painting of Ivan holding his son would likely have been this version of the short's ending. My plan was to have Otto have a girlfriend she loved and after doing a lot of drugs she is sent on her final mission by the devil to kill said girlfriend, to which she panics and tries to warn her, however the very high Otto isn't able to communicate what is happening in a way that makes sense and winds up scaring off her girlfriend. The short would end with Otto deciding to kill the devil and waiting as he knock on her door to which she shoots him through it, but as the door opens the corpse of her lover falls through and lands on her arms as she cries and holds her.

    My team wasn't 100% on board with everything I had written about, saying it's too dark and needs to focus less on tragedy and more on comedy. I definetley understand their concerns but I have such high ambitions for this short that I know we will have to find a way to settle in the middle ground, which I already know will be hard.