clash royale (INCOMPLETE)

 For this year’s Cambridge Portfolio Project, myself and my team, Joaquin and Andrew, decided to go on and make the kookiest, unconventional short film of all time. We had very ambitious ideas from the start and wanted nothing but to tell a story that would not only be important to us but impact those who watch it, more in a comedic way than profound.

 

I’d say for sure that our original idea which was having our main character, Otto, smoke weed as a fuel of power from the devil himself and then end up killing her girlfriend was WAY out of bounds of what I wanted to create. It was out there, which I liked, but at the same time I thought it was just way too much not only for myself to enjoy producing, but for us to execute well as a whole. Not all of us were comfortable with the idea, and it was made obvious, but luckily after a couple days of researching some media texts that shared our same genre of dark comedy, we came back and upgraded our story to be much less intense with no killing of lovers involved! 

When coming up with ideas for The Scourge and developing its aesthetic and overall tone, research definitely played a really big role in solidifying what exactly I wanted within all of those things. Researching media texts sharing our same genre also helped us a ton with understanding dark comedy a lot better! We learned the basics of the genre, its conventions, and how to execute it well, especially since our short tackles the sensitive topic of religion and power struggle, we really wanted to know how to do this right without being downright offensive.

 
The productions that my team and I took most inspiration from were The Amazing Digital Circus, The Binding of Issac, and Dan Da Dan. There were many more but those are the 3 that were the most important to myself, Joaquin, and Andrew. Through our research, we learned that dark comedy combines elements of humor and tragedy and or darker themes. As said by IMDb, the genre often also touches on taboo topics like death, crime, dysfunction, and societal issues all while being super silly to spark some contrast in an amusing way. Dark comedies are to be handled carefully, as not doing so would take away from the meaning that is attempting to be conveyed. Taking that all into consideration, we then looked at specific media texts that fall under the dark comedy genre. All these texts focus on heavy subject matters while having a silly exterior. 

My personal research mostly focused on The Amazing Digital Circus and how it dives into serious topic matters while also still maintaining a silly tone (most of the time). I was really interested in how the show handled Caine's character (the AI ringleader antagonist). It first introduces him as a goofy, happy go lucky guy who wants nothing but to entertain the circus members, to making him go insane and begin torturing each and every single one of them in different ways, the most significant being with their traumas. For Annie's character, I took inspiration from Caine's personality and aimed to make him go down the path of increasing insanity. The difference between Annie and Caine though is that Annie is PURE EVIL while Caine turned bad solely because he was malfunctioning due to not fulfilling his AI purposes well. Annie isn't an AI, he's the devil! 

Other media texts that were significant in the development of our film as mentioned before were The Binding of Isaac, mainly researched by Joaquin, and Dan Da Dan, researched by myself and Andrew.

The Binding of Issac touches on religious themes while not being afraid to pull any punches as Issac is literally being traumatized by religion throughout the entire game. Joaquin took this as inspiration and as a result we ended up with an insane product touching on religious subject matter with Biblical references like Cain and Able, The Golden Calf, and The Binding of Isaac. We wanted to make our film a sort of an uncomfortable but yet amusing watch, similar to how The Binding of Isaac video game did it. 

This is sort of similar to how we also took inspiration from Dan Da Dan with the goofy, yet uncomfortable amusing tone. The anime also isn't afraid to pull any punches, especially the visual ones (ghghhhg). I mainly took inspiration from Dan Da Dan for the general vibe and aesthetic of our short film. I wanted our brand to be goofy while also making it quite ominous with the way we interact with audiences along with the color palette and all. I admire how incredibly weird Dan Da Dan is, so I really wanted to take away something significant out of it and do my best in making our short film a literal embodiment of all our weirdness, Joaquin, Andrew, and I!

Along with us, our target audience are also pretty unconventional. The Scourge mainly engages with audiences through its visual humor, snappy pacing, and general vibe and aesthetic. Our target audience consists of predominately young individuals that are fans of dark humor who fall under the alternative and queer categories. They are also mostly Americans who fall under the middle/upper middle classes with income, as our film is in English (lol required) and takes place in during the 2000s in suburbia south Florida.

 As for our social media, target audiences are mostly engaged through the way we interact with them along with the aesthetic that we brand our film around. Each one of my posts have a consistent, cohesive color palette that draw in members of our audience who are fans of art along with the ominous, occult vibe. Along with my page's color palette, it also maintains a unique brand through the font used consistently throughout. The font I've been using for each post is called Ghastly Panic and it does the job perfectly in making them stand out and setting up the tone for our film, both silly and goofy with a spice of profoundness and seriousness!

 For the print component, our postcards maintain the brand I developed with the social media and our final film through implementing the same black and red aesthetic and similar fonts, which once more stands out to those in our target audience interested in our production's artistic direction and general vibe. One of our postcards is very similar to the one seen in our final film as Annie gives his "card" to Otto, the only difference being that we made the title of our film the largest text on the front of it. We wanted to have a nice little call back from our film's narrative to engage better with audiences and make them go all like "woahhh that's the thing we saw in the movie that's so cool! woah!! these guys are so awesome!!"Our other postcard will be the same as the first but with some nice key art on the back that will engage with audiences by showing each important character featured in the Scourge, standing out to Otto, Annie, Issac, and Mable fans all around the world! Our short film itself especially engages with our strange peculiar target audience with an almost non sensical plot filled with power hunger and evil entities disguised as a friendly neighborhood southern fella. Each shot in our production also has a warm, dark tint to it that is synonymous to the brand we developed in our social media and postcard, especially the night time scenes, they do an amazing job with branding!

(insert pics of finished postcards)