My Humorous Monologue

JensenT_Comedy from Kapaa Middle School MEDIA on Vimeo.
For the past couple weeks in Kapa'a Middle School's GT class, kids from sixth grade to eighth grade have been working very hard to memorize and film their comedic monologues.  The long class periods of editing, filming and memorizing have come to an end, the monologues are complete.  Each person takes knowledge away from this project, knowledge of how to edit, film, and use a camera.  Each has made their own mistakes, but I am here to tell you all about what I learned.  I think the most important thing I learned is to not procrastinate so much.  I didn't film my B-roll till the very last day, this made me really stressed out and I was searching high and low for footage to add.  Lucky for me we got extra days to film, but I know that I can't expect that to happen all the time.

Pad is when you add extra time at the beginning and at the end of your clips.  It is important to pad your clips because when you just start right when the camera you're going to cut a lot of your video, clips or sound off.  Also if you don't add pad you are going to have to re-film and no one wants to re-film.  Pad is also really good to have because it's really easy to do and it only takes a couple seconds. Make sure you pad when you are filming, it makes editing and your life ten times easier and way less stressful!

My biggest weakness is I procrastinate way to much and by the end of the project I am stressed and struggling to finish the project.  My strength is editing, I love editing and I think it's pretty easy.  I can improve by trying for the best
not the average.  I think if i tried harder to make it perfect my work would be a lot better.  I really enjoyed this project and I can't wait to do another one like it soon! 

Comedy Writing

Having a sense of humor is a very important trait to have because it makes you really fun to be around because you can joke back to someone when they are joking about you.  I also think it's good because you can make people laugh a lot and that makes you really fun and likable.  Having a good sense of humor also makes you a happier and more positive person. When you have a sense of humor it allows you to understand when someone is joking around with you vs. when someone is purposefully teasing you, this will make it so your not overly sensitive when someone is joking with you.

If you decide to be crazy and attempt at writing a humorous narrative here's a few things you should know before you venture off into the unknown! The first is write about something you can relate to, like for example one of my jokes is about school dances, I know about school dances because I've been to a lot of them before. The second tip I have is use your own voice, if you are sarcastic write a sarcastic joke, if you aren't sarcastic write about something else. The third tip I have is to make sure you find your joke funny before you decide to present it in front of an audience. The reason for this is because if you don't find it funny, others may not. Also, if you don't find your joke funny then you won't be able to deliver it properly, if you don't deliver it properly it more than likely won't be very funny.  My fourth tip for you is that you should make sure to be descriptive but not too much that it causes the audience to get bored and stop listening.  I suggest throwing jokes everywhere throughout the story.  For example "I had this really bad day once why don't I tell you about it... Why did the chicken cross the road? So about this really bad day...." Doing something like that will cause the reader or audience to laugh more.  I'm just kidding don't put a joke in the middle of a sentence, but you get the idea of it. My fifth and final suggestion for you is that you have the biggest joke, with the biggest laugh at the very end, that way you can lead up to it the whole story.

I have two comedic monologues, the first one is "When I was little I watched a lot of Disney channel movies and every single one of them made school dances look absolutely amazing, but now that I’m in eighth grade they’re really not all they were cut out to be, it’s really just people sitting around eating and listening to music. Like isn’t that what you all do at home? Why would you leave the comfort of your home to sit on uncomfortable bleachers?" This joke would only be funny to people my age because the generation before us did dance at school dances, but my generation doesn't.  This joke is funny because it's one of those "that is so true," jokes.  My second joke also only appeals to teenagers. "My mom always used to tell me teenagers think they know everything, but they really don’t. Now that I am a teenager I realized she was wrong, I do know everything," this is funny because it's proving that what my mom said is right.

Motivational Poster

For our motivational poster we need to have four pictures.  The first three are pictures that we took of things that symbolize us.  I took a picture of a bush in the desert in front of these big canyons, this picture symbolizes me because I am a small part of a big and beautiful picture.  The second one was a picture of a corner of a path, this symbolizes me because I never know what's going to happen in life but I just keep walking.  My final symbol is of a rainbow,  a rainbow symbolizes me because I can make someones day brighter even after a terrible day.  We also had to include a portrait of ourselves, we had a partner take it and we took theirs.  We wrote manifestos and needed to include those along with personal quotes that we wrote. To make our motivational poster visually appealing we had to kern our words to make it fit the entire page.  Not only that but we needed to have different text and font sizes.  We had a Triadic Color Scheme which is three colors evenly spaced around the color wheel.

The very first step of our first 2015-2016 GT project was to write our own personal quotes, the second step was to write our manifesto.  After we wrote both of those things we copied and pasted those two pieces of text into Photoshop and kerned them so that the text went from one side of the page to the other without any gaps. When we finished kerning we added our four images that we took, three symbols and one portrait of ourselves.  Once we added the images we laid them out so there was no spaces and they all fit nicely.  After adding and adjusting our images we started getting creative and using or triadic color scheme to change the color of the text, to our text we added strokes, bevel and emboss, drop shadows etc.  As soon as we were done adding effects to our text we started with the images.  I individually edited each of my images before adding my effects to all of them.  I saturated each of my images, to make them stand out more. I also adjusted the brightness and contrast of all the photos individually.  I then added the adjustment layer curves to all of my images.    

I think my biggest challenge was trying to get the text to cover the whole page without any gaps.  I think this was my biggest challenge because I was only thinking about having the text one way and I wasn't open to any more ideas.  When I finally found another way to do it I kerned it so there wasn't any more gaps.  The other reason I had trouble with it was because I wanted it to be obvious that there was two separate pieces of text, my manifesto being first and my personal quotes being last. As soon as I figured out a way to make it obvious it was two separate pieces of text (by making the font size and font color different,) I was able to make it look nice and I was able to show the two separate pieces of text.