Week 3

This week in film comeday we watched a few more funny clips and learned a bit more about what makes something funny. We saw the clip "The Sprinkler Sprinkled" which I had seen before in film studies class in first year. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HVj7kezK98 We see here that its funny because the butt of the joke makes the joke in the end when he chases him with the hose. There is a reversal of roles here. We also watched "Transformation of Hats, Comic View" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvY_cDdeV34 It´s suposed to show how disguise can be funny but I didn´t find this clip funny. We also watched some Charlie Chapman shorts. When I was younger I thought that Charlie Chapman was really funny but for some reason now that I am older I don´t find him funny. We watched "In the Park" and "The Champion". These types of comedy are all based on the body and most comic situations are attacks on the body. But here the violence doesn´t have any real consequences as blood kills any aspect of comedy. We also see how Charlie Chapmans character always pretends to be the perfect gentlemen but it turns out that he is quite the opposite. There are also alot of probs in these clips which add to the comic moments. I enjoyed watching these clips and learning about what makes them funny. Even if I didn´t find some of them particularly funny I understand that this was the begining of comedy. People watching these would never have seen anything like this before and they would ahve found it funny. I look forward to watching more clips in class tomorrow and hopefully in the next few weeks it will move on to more modern clips.


History of design was alot more interesting this week so I hope it keeps going in this direction. We learned about some influential designers such as William Morris (1834-1896), Architect Philip Webb, (who designed a house for William Morris that was medieval inspired) and Frederick W.Goudy who had a unique cartoon style. William Morris was the most important of these. He is best known as the leader of arts and crafts and was a British Avant Garde designer. He designed lots of books and designed his own trade mark that appeared on all of his books.

    William Morris Trademark

Other Willaim Morris designs include:

We also watched a short documentary about him and then at the end of class we had to pick one of his designs and try to draw it. I found this part difficult as I am terrible at drawing.

In effective presentations we went over the three key stages in preparing for a presentation. They are strategy, structure and style. Strategy involves tailoring your message to the specific audience. Once you know what you´re going to say you need to structure your material into a meaningful message. The audience need to know why they should be listening to you and once you have their attention you need to show them why they should care about what you are saying. the style of your presentaion involves your posture, tone, enthusiasm and ridiating confidence. We also talked about the outline of a presentation and what the opening of your presentaion should contain. This comes in the form of ABCD.

• Attention = capture your audience´s interest instantly
• Benefit = explain what they will gain from the talk
• Credibility = show them you have the authority to speak
• Direction = give them a route map of the presentation

For class this week we have to have researched a topic that we want to do our presentaion on that we will discuss in class and then have the main outline typed up for friday. I think I would like to do my presentation travelling as I have travelled to America, Canada, Thailand and now Spain. I would hope to inform the class of each of these countries resulting in them wanting to travel there.

This week myself Sinead and Emma also finished our project proposal that we will hand up tomorrow. We have decided to film a movie trailer for a horror film. We will all work together on this dividing out the roles between us and then at the end we will individually design our own posters as a way of advertising the film and then also each do a 1500 word essay on the genre of horror. I am really looking forward to starting on this project. We hand up our proposal tomorrow ad then out lecturer will let us know how many credits we will get for it.