To start off the school year we’ve been exploring the topic question: how does style and form impact meaning? Over the past month or so we’ve been working extensively on our reading and writing skills by doing a lot in class writing and other critical thinking activities. So far we’ve worked through three timed essays, one on-paper essay, a synthesis paragraph, and many worksheets/questions that worked on our style and form. In our iTunes U course we were also provided with materials to teach us different essay formats, such as narrative, persuasive, and expository. We assessed different ways to analyze and approach each kind of essay and we also looked at some of the writing techniques that the authors used in hopes to influence our own writing.
For the first major project in PLP 12 we were given a week of class time to come up with and create our own individual satires. But first, what’s a satire?
Before starting the project and jumping into the creation process, we spent an entire class learning how to differentiate a satire and a parody, and looking at examples of what a good satires looks like. In my own words, both satires and parodies are meant to be comedic, but a satire, in contrast to a parody, criticizes a certain point of view or a certain subject to send a thoughtful message to the reader/audience. A good satire points out a flaw or injustice in our society, and uses techniques such as humour, irony, and exaggeration to bring up that point. The purpose of bringing that point up is to induce change, and to allow the viewer to see the problem in a new light or from a different point of view.
Examples of effective satires can be found below.
On the first day of class time I worked diligently in coming up with an idea for my skit, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t going to be as easy as I thought. What subject could I choose that’s controversial and current, and how could I add some sort of funny twist? This question stumped me and I ended up leaving class uncertain of what I was going to do.
However, later that day, I was sitting in the cafeteria with a friend of mine and we were discussing different topics and ideas that we could use for our videos. At the time we were discussing the effects of hurricane Maria, Irma and Henry, and a convincing meme about how the world was going to end, but then the topic of the NFL national anthem protests came up, and suddenly an idea popped into my head: Everyone is making such a big deal about what’s happening in the NFL, but nobody seems to be talking about the dire crisis that’s going on in Puerto Rico. Do they not know about it? Or do they just not care?
The next day in class I came up with the outline below.
Outline:
– Begins with two friends sitting on a couch casually talking and eating chips
– Camera turns to show tv with the players kneeling during the national anthem
– one friend begins talking about how it’s so unconstitutional and unamerican to not stand for the national anthem, siding with trump and his views that all the patriots should be fired
– The other friend takes the opposite of the argument, stating how it’s 2017 and it’s messed up that they’re still fighting for equality and basic human rights.
– The argument starts to get heated
– As the commercials come on the friends are still arguing and begin to wrestle
– As they wrestle in and out of the scene, Hurricane relief commercials about Puerto Rico and other commercials about world hunger/poverty in Africa play in the background
– The ads play uselessly with the intent to send the message that most Americans either choose not to acknowledge or don’t care about what is going on in Puerto Rico
– One friend gets the other in the camel clutch and yells for him to tap as the game comes back on
– The other replies with: wait wait the game is on
– The friend immediately lets go and they race back to the couch to watch kick off, still chirping each other
Looking past the fact that it’s informal, my outline includes attributes of exaggeration, humour, and current politics. However, like any eloquent satire, my idea also focuses on a particular subject with the intent to send a deeper message to the viewer. The island of Puerto Rico was almost completely taken out by a category 4 hurricane and people have been left homeless with little food, barely any clean drinking water, and no power. In my satire I hope to expose the notion that Americans either don’t care or choose not to acknowledge the crisis in Puerto Rico because they’re too caught up in the toils of their own country.
Over the next few days in class I continued to develop this idea and I was able to come up with an adequate script to go along with my outline.
Come Friday and the only thing left for me to complete was my video, but of course, like any lazy high school student, I left it until the last minute on Monday to get started. In my own defence, however, I had originally planned to film on Sunday, but my co star ethan failed to show up to the audition so I had to swap him out at the very last minute, giving my buddy Jackson a call at 11am on Monday.
Filming the skit turned out to be a lot more painful than I had originally hoped. At first I thought it would only take a maximum of one hour to film, but then I realized that I hadn’t even thought about what I was going to use to film or how I wanted to set up each scene, so I was extremely unprepared right off the bat.
In order to start filming we had to fully rearrange my living room to look completely different than it usually does, we had to duck tape a massive blanket over one of the windows, and we had to jerry rig my phone to a camera tripod using excess amounts of duct tape. However, once all that was set up it was mostly smooth sailing. The only issues that we ran into was the lack of storage/charge on my phone, me constantly bumping into the tripod, and having to redo each scene about 10 times over because we could never remember our lines. Oh also it was a massive pain to try to film with a strip of duct tape going down the middle of my phone screen..
Nonetheless! Four hours after we started, and over 50 takes later, we finally finished, and I’m extremely proud of the work that we put forward. I woke up this morning super stressed out, not knowing if I was going to end up filming today at all. But I ended up having a great time working with Jackson, and I learned a lot through making so many mistakes and having to improvise. Here’s my satire!
In order to create an effective satire I had to draw upon the lessons I learned about style and form throughout this unit. In my video I used exaggerated responses to insight a fight, which creates a humourous aspect to my skit. I also took advantage of American politics and used stereotypes in the passionate and well thought out responses of each character. And lastly, I used irony in how the characters were in a full out fist fight all throughout the Puerto Rico news report, but then they immediately stop fighting as soon as the game comes back on. The purpose for this was to create the notion that most Americans are selfish in their own lives and in the toils of their own country, and they don’t care about what’s going on in Puerto Rico.