#Comedy video shorts free#

If you’ve done a good job of shooting lots of angles and reaction shots, this can be a great way to build pace. There are plenty of tricks to keep the pace up, and a lot of it comes from the edit. But, generally speaking, comedy lends itself to rewarding the quickest of wits.

Yes, if you’re doing a stylized lampoon or parody of something, sometimes it’s great to be slow on purpose. Moving on to editing, comedy shorts are often very, very fast. When shooting, it just takes a few minutes to ask your actors to try a few more faces, to varying degrees, which you can hold in your back pocket as you begin to construct the humor in post. If you look at the comedy silent film classics, a well-timed reaction shot is the perfect way to make a joke land. Then, once the rigid work was done, to loosen things up and do as many takes as you can stand, while encouraging improvisation and new ideas to flow freely.Īnother simple trick that can help out in the edit is to shoot several reaction shots.

I often found that the best way to work was to cover your bases first and make sure you have every shot you’d need to put together an edit. However, it also helps to have a good backbone to your production with a set shot list. You never know what funny idea might develop once you start filming. Ideally, once you’ve spent enough time on what you think sounds and feels fresh and funny, you can start putting those ideas to paper by planning your outline, script, and shots.īecause of the nature of comedy, it’s helpful to go into production with the idea of being flexible.

#Comedy video shorts free#

You can do free association with just yourself and a piece of paper. It’s simply to explore ideas and “find the funny,” so to speak.Ī good brainstorming session doesn’t have to be done with a group, though.

The goal, at first, isn’t to come up with a solid concept. We’d meet up at a coffee shop with notebooks and just do free association and spitball, sometimes for hours. My favorite part of the process were these first meetings. The improv school put together a monthly video content where they would give us one word as the prompt, then the individual groups would have to take that and use “A to C” mentality to create whatever they wanted from there.

So, when I was personally shooting comedy shorts, it was with a group of friends from the improv class that I was taking. So, while there’s a lot to dive into as to what makes a video funny (that probably can’t be defined in a single article), here’s a guide to finding the funny and creating quality comedy shorts and videos. But the idea that any group of friends or improv-class buddies can grab a camera and make a comedy short that goes “viral” is entirely new. The art of the comedy short film is actually nothing new, and can be traced back to the earliest days of film and cinema with the works of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. Here are some helpful tips and tricks for shooting, directing, and editing comedy shorts to capture that magic for the world to see.īefore a whole generation was ruined with aspirations of becoming Instagram, Vine, or now TikTok famous, there was a whole - slightly older - generation ruined by chasing ever-elusive fame on video sharing platforms like Funny or Die or just YouTube.