may have posted this on here before, if so I do apologize.
New comedy mockumentary film about 4 indie kids living in a house together for one week.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zwwQ55s-_E
enjoy
My Perfect Indie Lifestyle (Comedy Short)
I'll be honest. I didn't enjoy the first minute or so and gave up on it.
They didn't look like indie kids to me. I got the impression that they were just young and ambitious kids who would rather look at the things they wanted in life, rather than at their own shoes, while perched on a bed in a darkened room.
Then again, I'm 41 and perhaps the scene has changed a lot since I was in my early 20s? I didn't buy any of the characters though. They looked like they were acting and not very well. They didn't look like they were doing their best for you, either.
I clicked the link, wanting to like it and think there would be plenty of material that could be generated, with the right script and characters.
Laughing at someone who is a little precious and who takes themselves far too seriously is in the best traditions of great British comedy. I don't want to feel that the actor is in on the joke though and that takes a lot of skill, as they obviously always are.
the term indie has changed so much over the last 5 years or so, the whole joke is that they are quite clearly not indie, cos indie stands for individual, and they are not cos they all look and dress the same (much like a lot of the youth today who also claim to be indie)
its all very confusing.
saying that thanks for giving it a go, check out some of our other stuff if you would like www.timelynation.weebly.com
Ok lets start of by saying this sucked worse than an atomic vacum cleaner in a blackhole and every minute you spent on it was wasted.
So why was it so bad? (and bad as a Jimmy Saville, Micheal Jackson rave in an orphanage bad).
Well for starters no one is going to sit through half an of amateur stuff ever (even if it features Mydleton sisters incest). Secondly you're replicating, hipsters yeh I've met some most of us have actually met hipsters and you might as well have been playing the New Forest for all your resemblance. But your just copying them, not subverting them. Haven't you ever watched Nathan Barley? Bascially all you've done is say "hey here we are pretending to be hipsters).
Secondly it's utterly shallow you can't really mock anything with out understanding it.
And you might as well have made a show about the undiscovered alien life in the far corner of the crab nebula.
Thirdly you can't act or direct. Your roles are all boring samey and obviously you doing funny voices (please note I don't use the word funny with the slightest implication that your voices weren't infact funny, they weren't)
I think in the endless, purgatory that was the 10 minutes I watched of this show. I spotted 2 and they were both very bad.
So in short try again but do everything diferent. That or take up gardening.
Quote: samjohnson @ December 14 2012, 12:08 PM GMTthe term indie has changed so much over the last 5 years or so, the whole joke is that they are quite clearly not indie, cos indie stands for individual, and they are not cos they all look and dress the same (much like a lot of the youth today who also claim to be indie)
its all very confusing.
saying that thanks for giving it a go, check out some of our other stuff if you would like www.timelynation.weebly.com
This is also the worst premise for a sketch ever.
I mean it's up there with lesbian Hitler and "what if the Chuckle Brothers were Fred and Rose West?"
so I take it you didnt enjoy it then?
f**k man, fair play if it wasnt your thing and all that and we're always open to listening to peoples feedback good or bad, but comparing us to peodofiles? really?
you need to calm the f**k down mate, its only comedy, whether you think its good or bad, we're young lads making short films and sketches not axe murderers
Sootyj, that's a ridiculously over the top response. Most comedy fails to nail it. My Perfect Indie Lifestyle belongs on the cutting room floor, for me too, but there is no need to attack someone like that.
Every other forum on the internet seems to be full of out and out abuse, but comedy.co.uk seems remarkably free of it. With 39000 posts behind you, I am surprised you don't appear to care much for the ethos promoted by SlagA, as a sticky comment in the Critique section...
"The BCG forums are remarkable in that debate is almost completely free of trolls and bruised egos. Please help keep it that way by remembering that feedback / comments are meant to develop ideas and writers; not to cripple people with cruel barbs."
@Samjohnson, indie stands for independent and refers to the record labels that the bands tended to be signed with, back in the 1980s (perhaps earlier, also).
They mainly looked and dressed the same back then, as well, and were always quick to point out the imposters within their genre (the imposter was always someone else, and not themselves!).
Just flicking through old posts and yet again I'm getting slammed for having a large number of posts.
Would it be best for me to resign my membership and start again from zero? Or just piss off.
I am getting sick of this. And nothing I said was unfair or untrue. And I've had similar feedback.
You put stuff up and sometimes you get knocked back down.
I didn't really find it funny, but I think the premise was a good one.
I think if you did a bit of a rewrite it could be good.
sooty, you really need to calm down and get a grip. Your style of critiquing toward new members really is incredibly unpleasant.
To the OP, if you haven't seen it already, this is a pretty hilarious encapsulation of the Indie lifestyle. Sadly it's not a parody...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CjWXen-Niqc#!
The big positive is that it's a fantastic effort to produce 30 minutes of comedy. It must have been a lot of hard work and can only have helped you develop as a writer/performer/producer/whatever your role was.
The earlier poster made his point a bit forcefully maybe, but some of his criticisms are worth paying attention to (particularly about mocking hipsters rather than subverting or doing anything particularly clever with them - it's a very thin joke to try to spread over half an hour).
If you're looking for advice, mine would be to try something much less ambitious next time. Nail something much shorter and work up to TV-length projects.
"The whole joke is that they are quite clearly not indie, cos indie stands for individual". Arrrrggghhh. Major Fail.
A little general knowledge goes a long way, whatever the area of writing. And as HamOnRye rightly said indie means independent record label, applicable to pre-1993, when it actually meant "do what thou will musically before the corporate cock suckers buy up our label and back catalogue and dump you as fast as you can say, processed cheese".
However while not my cup of tea, I wouldn't knock you for effort.
Here's my own short take on a similar theme, and why am I thinking of the band, The Editors, as I write this??
INT. MUSIC VENUE
4 young men on stage, singer, guitarist, bass player and drummer, they wear the 'Joy Division' look.
SINGER: This next song is called, 'Imitation is the sincerest form of...lacking any original ideas'. It's an anthem for today's yoof. Hope you enjoy. One, two, three, four.
SONG STARTS
SINGER SINGS VERSE 1: Oh don't we sound like Joy Division? Oh please say we sound like Joy Division. Cause we've worked really hard to sound like Joy Division. Please say we sound like Joy Division.
SINGER SINGS VERSE 2: Oh don't I sound a bit like Ian Curtis? Oh please say I sound a bit like Ian Curtis. Cause I've worked really hard to sound like Ian Curtis. Look! I can even do the spaz dancing.
SINGER SINGS CHORUS: Oh I wish we had a time machine, so we could go back in time and murder the members of Joy Division, so we could steal their name and play their music, and no one in the present would be any the wiser.
SINGER SINGS FINAL VERSE: Oh don't we sound like Joy Division? Oh please say we sound like Joy Division. Cause we've worked really hard to sound like Joy Division. Please say we sound like Joy Division.
The singer does spaz mental dancing as song plays out to finish.
I thought the above needed a better ending.
INT. MUSIC VENUE
Song plays out to finish.
SPARSE APPLAUSE from sparse venue crowd.
AUDIENCE MEMBER (O.S.): I know they're the same band but that was more Warsaw than Joy Division.
Singer holds his head, distraught.
SINGER: F**k!!
it must just be where we live (South East London)or even just the college we went to, if you dress head to toe in topman clothing and wear clear frame glasses your automatically branded an indie kid round here, that might not happen anywhere else lol
No worries, Sam. I'm 37 and 'indie' was the music of my yoof but I remember even back then there were still a lot of people into 'indie' who didn't know what it meant.
Just a thought but why don't you make your characters at odds with their own yoof culture. Have them attempt to revive 'Prog Rock', while being heavily influenced by Spinal Tap but not getting the "joke". Or something along those lines.
Contrive, exaggerate, and above all create conflict.
Good luck to you