Comedy Film Research - Forms and Conventions

As we have now decided to do a comedy trailer, we have started looking at various comedy trailers, such as hot fuzz, to better understand the generic qualities involved in showcasing a comedy film.

We first looked at Hot Fuzz as it is our inspiration for our film and is a good example of a film that will be roughly similar to ours. We are also both big fans of this film and therefore believe if our film has similar qualities we should be well prepared to produce it. Something we really enjoyed and thought was clever was the close up 'eyes shot' (4-5 seconds in), as it is used to build up tension, but what we really liked was that it demonstrated the two characters personalities. We think we could use this type of shot for comedic effect so we could build up tension to make a scene even funnier.
We also liked how at the end of the trailer (33-45 seconds), after the name of the film appeared on the screen, another small funny clip was shown to leave the viewer laughing and hopefully associate the funniness of the clip with the name of the film that appeared.

The 'Paul Blart: Mall Cop' Trailer has many examples of scenes which are unexpectedly funny to the viewer, such as when at the start of the trailer, the camera angles and setting suggest an area where physical fitness is taken very seriously, which makes it funnier for the viewer when you see the unfit man trying to compete with the others (11-15 seconds). Another example of this is at 1.43-1.56, when after a variety of action scenes, you see the policeman try to slide around a pillar dramatically. Because the trailer built up tension from all of the action scenes, it made it even funnier when the star fails.
We wanted to integrate this idea into our film trailer and have decided to use it at the end during the 'car slide' scene. If we have a variety of action scenes follwed by the thief performing the car slide, then hopefully it will be funny when the actor fails the following slide.

Something that I have noticed from both of these trailers is how important camera angles are when demonstrating something funny. If the camera angle changes when the joke happens it can draw the viewer towards it. If the camera angle does not change, it becomes less obvious something out of the ordinary has happened.

The beggining of Anchorman builds tension before making the teleprompter joke(2-26 seconds),  much like the beginning scene of Paul Blart. However, the Anchorman trailer spends around 30 seconds introducing the main character, rather than quickly showing him in the first 5-10 seconds. This trailer also shows the jokes of the film while at the same time showing the storyline, which differs from the other trailers who tend to intersperse the storyline scenes with joke scenes.