10/10/17

Today in class we began by talking about the differences between tone of a text, versus the tone of a character. Tone of a character is developed on scales of sincere to ironic, formal to casual, and negative to positive. To see tone of a text we watched a clip (The Dundies, S2:E1 around 12 minutes in when he starts rapping) from the office with half of the class focusing on the tone of the text, and the other half focusing on the tone of a character (Michael Scott). Tones for Michael were comic, giddy, and ebullient. He shows these tones by rapping in the beginning, making jokes, and being very upbeat while talking. The tone of the text was very different though, it had an awkward tone due to all the other characters just sitting there silently and uncomfortably. In addition it’s also disjointed because nothing is going according to plan, the music gets unplugged, his jokes are failing, and no one else shares Michael’s enthusiasm. After this discussion we watched the scene again to focus on the craft of the scene and how it developed the tone. Our group talked about how the camera work of focusing on the other characters reactions to Michael’s shenanigans develops the awkward theme of the text, showing how everyone else is uncomfortable. We then had a fire drill and got back right as the bell rang.

In relation to our discussion of this tone between character tone and text tone I think another great example of this is the show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The show revolves around 5 friends who own a bar and has a very comedic tone on an ironic level, showing all the terrible things they do. However the tone of the characters themselves isn’t comedic, many time it is choleric as many of the characters have extremely short tempers and doing things such as screaming at woman on a dating service when not given 5 stars.