Final Posts - Part 2

Creative Reflection

    Spring Cleaning is a short film simply focused on entertaining the viewer through an outrageous but in some aspects relatable story. The short film uses its characters to show certain aspects of human connection. 

The short film is a combination of two other genres, genres that on paper have nothing to do with one another, neo noir and comedy. These two genres are incredibly different and aren’t seen too often together because they are opposites in many aspects.  Neo-noirs often are quite serious and melancholic, taking their time to progress or they often have more mature subject matter. Comedies on the other hand can often be filled with immature jokes and are at least almost always light in tone and subject matter. So the film got around this hurdle by making a substantial amount of the comedy about the ridiculousness of common tropes in the neo-noir genre. Spring Cleaning has its characters mention many things that many don’t often bat an eye to through dialogue and visuals depending on what aspect it is. 

However, because the film is still part neo-noir, Spring Cleaning did use some of the aspects to enhance itself before turning itself around on the trope. The black and white screen is the trope that is used the most in the short film before being mentioned as a joke. Many neo-noirs still use the black and white screen, Sin City being a great example. Its use of color and tone greatly inspired the way my short film tackled certain elements. Sin City uses the black and white screen to put an emphasis on its more serious tone, but that serious tone ended up being a detriment to the film. Its tone caused the overly serious dialogue to be unintentionally funny, creating the idea to simply take that up a notch for intentional comedic effect in Spring Cleaning through the contrast of something grounded and serious with something almost outlandish. This was the first idea for the comedy in the film and it worked as the basis for many of the other aspects, take the trope and use it purposefully before turning it on its head. All of the neo-noir conventions with one exception.

The femme-fatale has no appearance or mention in the film at all. Both of the characters are male but the main reason this convention didn’t receive any attention was because of the fact that it was a comedy. The target audiences between a neo-noir film and comedy are completely different. Neo-noirs are often adult men and comedies are more for both men and women and the age has a much wider range from children to adults. In general Spring Cleaning is not as serious and is more light than a full on neo-noir so for the target audience the production chose to treat the target audience more like it was a comedy film.  Neo-noirs contain the femme-fatale, which is a character which essentially exists only in relation to the male characters in the story due to her often seductive looks and personality. This obviously leads into more of a male interest in the film so getting rid of it actually widened my target audience slightly. There are other aspects in the film that also do things to my target audience, the comedy being self aware and sometimes meta means that the target demographic must be a little older to understand those moments because of the context needed surrounding it. I also once again must go back to the fact that the short film still does use the trope before throwing them out so it also means the target audience is a bit older. The age range becomes roughly 16-40 taking all that into account with more than just men being able to enjoy the piece.

    With the target audience in mind I decided that I wanted the brand of the film to be a combination of both to attract both sides. It seemed it would be possible to have them work in conjunction however it was not very successful. The short film itself obviously does this the best, with the black and white screen along with some other aspects like the voice over narration characters often get in the neo-noir genre being used to both characterize one of the characters in Spring Cleaning while he describes his past on top of also providing another joke by poking fun at it at the same time. Then there is the social media page which isn’t as clear as the short film. The social media page for the most part remains neutral and doesn’t really show either, which is unfortunate. I did try to bring in both elements but I feel like they both felt out of place in terms of the social media page itself, when looking at the entire project they are fine. It just leaves the page feeling a little inconsistent. Then there are the postcards which tackle this the worst. They solely focus on the neo-noir aspect of the genre, there is text in the short film which feels akin to the text in the Godfather so it was also used for the postcards. However, because they are only postcards none of the comedic aspects were shown, leaving only the neo-noir. Improvements mainly are needed in the postcard so on the back a different picture can be included hinting at the comedic aspect of the film, anything in the film that represents a lighter experience. 

The lighter experience also helps in providing the very light amount of representation the film has. Spring Cleaning doesn’t do anything in terms of representing certain ethnic groups or current political or social issues. It instead hints at a more personal social problem that many face with simply the experience of trying to connect. The two characters start off as complete strangers due to the stubbornness of one of them. The car scene, the biggest scene of the film, has one character talking for a vast majority of the time. However, I don’t think it was successful in this because of how it doesn’t really go anywhere and is overshadowed by other events in other scenes which almost neglect to mention it.