THE CONVENTIONS OF OPENING SEQUENCES OF A COMEDIC GENRE

BY NATASHA AND LARA

MAIN TYPES OF COMEDY

• Dark Humour – Tends to involve a tragedy behind it but uses things like rape, terrorism and drugs, yet the characters tend to make each of these scenario’s funny

• Slapstick – Overly exaggerated and uses lots of props and amusing costumes such as trousers that fall down and baggy clothing

• Wordplay – Intellectual comedy such as big bang theory, which uses lots of clever vocabulary but the way in which they are presented by characters tends to make it funny, such as characters not caring what the clever ones have to say about a situation

TITLES

• The titles tend to use a colourful theme within the writing of the credits at the beginning

• The writing tends to use bubble writing or more exciting writing unlike block writing in a horror

CAMERA ANGLES

• Normally uses a naturalistic angle to show each character and represent them in their own ways

• They tend to be quite fast paced as something tends to happen like in hangover when they originally find out how far away from home they are

• The title comes in and the camera angle zooms out to give a long shot of the scene

SETTING

• Location tends to be in a social area such as a school or in a family environment

• Bright colours and places which show normally a happy or amusing area like being hit in the head after doing a long shot of a bright field

PROPS

• Props tend to be used in a comedy environment such as in slapstick comedy when a character gets hurt by being hit or falling over a car when riding a bike

• If the character is seen as dumb, they may have some sort of messy food with them that they drop over themselves or other people like a ‘chilli dog’

SOUND

• It normally starts with diegetic sound of a character shouting or waking up and after a small amount of dialect, there tends to be non-diegetic sound of the title sequence

• The title tends to have a soundtrack that is quite excitable or happy such as ‘dumb and dumber too’

• There is normally loud non-diegetic sound to provide a full-on atmosphere

LIGHTING

• Often uses natural light rather than any artificial like they would use in other genre’s like a night light in a horror film such as paranormal activity

• It tends to be extremely bright and set in a daylight area to show it is a happy scene

• Bright colours tend to be used if it isn’t set out in daylight