Practitioners:

Andy Samberg:

Andy Samberg (Born 1978) is an American comedian, actor, writer, musician and producer who started his career created the comedic musical group The Lonely Island with Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone in 2001 and later made a proper break out into the media industry in 2005 when he joined the Saturday Night Live writers team.

From there he went on to star in several film, such as his 2007 film debut in Hot Rod, Co-staring with Adam Sandler in the Hotel Transylvania trilogy and even producing his own, like the mockumentary Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, which he actually made with the other two members of The Lonely Island, and is currently staring and producing the NBC show (formal FOX) Brooklyn Nine Nine.

He’s main style of comedy is to be as absurd and inappropriate as he can get away with being whenever he’s in a leading role (E.G. any of his music videos or sports documentary spoofs). In his sketches on Saturday Night Live, his delivery of the lines and/or directions he was given was often rooted in realism at the beginning before skewing off into whatever kind of acting style (usually ridiculous) that the scenario required, whether he needs to play along with his surroundings or be baffled and disturbed by them.

I think the biggest inspiration I will take from him will be his method of character portrayal and integrating ridiculous or bizarre people into a (sometime) realistic setting or group of people and have the scene maintain consistency in the dialogue and flow; for example, in Brooklyn 99 he play an immature and cheerful police detective who regularly investigates brutal crimes. This character never feels out of place in a scene because he is written to be able to cope with the things he sees and keep up a upbeat attitude because of his past (which is explored throughout the show) and how he interacts with the other characters.

I intend to do something similar with my main character by give little snippets and hints about his background and having the other character talk about him as if they’ve known him for a long time and are really just used to his antics at this point.

Ricky Gervais:

Ricky Gervais (born 25 June 1961) is a British stand up comedian, actor, musician, screenwriter and director. He initial career was in the music industry in the 1980s as the singer for the band Seona Dancing and later a manager for Suede, only breaking out into the world of comedy in the 90s with stand up and eventually co-creating The Office in 2001.

Since then, he has created and starred in several films, TV and radio shows, and stand up acts, such as Extras, The Ricky Gervais Show and The Invention of Lying. His style of comedy is usually a rather mean spirited one, with a lot of insults and dark (controversial) jokes.

The main thing I want the take most from him is his cinematic style; camera angles, transitions, shot types, even the same kind of camera quality. These things were all used in his series The Office to make it feel like it was actually just a camera crew there filming the all of drama that goes on in this office building. I want to use the same kind of techniques to make this seem like as few people as possible were actually in the village where this is set and are filming and talking to the main character.

Competition:

Based on everything said in the podcast, it seem like the only thing I really need to do to properly stand out against them is to properly realize my idea in my final product and to make sure that it maintains a consistent level of quality; don’t do anything over ambitious and fail or anything to basic that could be boring.

Target audience:

The information gathered from my survey (limited as it may be) tells me that the main demographic of my mockumentary will be young adult male students who enjoy darker kind of comedy; such as South Park or The Mighty Boosh, and also enjoy documentaries that have an even balance of light hearted and serious moments (the result screen for this question is a bit confusing; 0 is light, 100 is serious, for some reason it’s only showing up to fifty).

Legalities/Ethics:

Many of my scenes will be filmed in public places that don’t have signs that specify any restrictions meaning it’s completely legal for me to film there for as long as I need to. There is one location in particular that will require permission for me to film in.

Some of the themes do centre around the main character having Delusional Disorder that causes him do the things he does and his bad home life is implied through dialogue and brief cutaways which could be viewed by some as inappropriate or insensitive.

As long as everything I use in the video is either my own work or stated to be original creator to be royalty/copyright free with credit given to them, I will be aloud to present the final product where ever I want. Based on information available online, these are really the only thing I will need to watch out for.

This films will be rated a 12 by the parameters of the British Board of Film Classification, due to the few cases of strong language and underlying themes of mental sickness and abuse. There won’t be any depictions or references of violence, drugs or sex and the language is somewhat minimal, so the rating wouldn’t need to be at a 15, even though that is closer to the target demographic.

Ideas/concepts:

There isn’t anything in particular that inspired the first concept for this film, but I was very interested in some of the possible collusions between the main character wanting something fictional and impossible and how his mentality might work differently. This film will be an attempt to explore coping mechanisms that a person with mental issues and poor home lives may develop while trying to be humorous at the same time. I’m mostly taking inspiration from shows like Life’s to Short in the style of cinematography and structure.

Most of the dialogue will come from interviews with the characters discussing the main and a voice over from the presenter of documentary talking about delusional disorder and other relevant things. These lines will be played over various shots, such as establishing shots at the beginning during major introductions and tracking or stationary shots showing the main character.

Based off of what I know of them, Mockumentaries work best when there is a specific thing that is being parodied, such as the music industry like in Gary Weis and Eric Idle’s 1978 film All You Need Is Cash (Also commonly known as The Rutles) where they portrayed an humorous emulation of The Beatles career, or Rob Reiners 1984 film This is Spinal Tap which is reminiscent of real rock band documentaries like The Last Waltz and Gimme Shelter.

There isn’t really any one thing that my film will be parodying, but rather the entertainment industries new found obsession with comic book super heroes that were initially just made to be children’s escapist power fantasies.

A vital part of comedy in any form is what people do find funny. This is something that is very hard to pick point because humour is completely subjective and evolves in every person as they grow and change (E.G. children might find silly noises funny but then later in life find them really annoying). Since my demographic is on the younger side, dark comedy that isn’t very outrageous or offensive like some works from my practitioners; That’s My Boy with Andy Samberg was very reliant on shocking the audience with outlandish humour and it was terrible.

Technical requirements:

There will two main kinds of shot in my mockumentary; medium close ups for interviews that will all be filmed indoors (using the rule of thirds and focusing) and handheld tracking shots for outdoors scenes that will mostly following the main character around as he does his tests. I’ll probably not need any equipment more advanced than an AV pack and Final Cut Pro will do just fine for the post production.

Budget:

Costumes = cheap clothing and stuff I can make myself (felt to make emblems and fabric for a cape), so I likely won’t need to spend any more than £20.

Transport = all of the filming is happening in the area where I live, and is not far for my actors to travel; walk or bus so maybe £8.

Equipment = Camera (£245), Shotgun mic (£50), Stabilizer (£35), Tripod (£25), Tie mic (£10).

Evaluation:

The research I have done will mostly help me with the direction and scripting; the practitioner research (mostly watching other peoples works) helped me to understand how to work humour into an interviews and direct actors who are supposed to acknowledge to camera, and the legal and ethical research showed me just how far I can actually go with the humour of the characters disorder, which actually lead me to change the idea from a straight comedy to a proper look at his hypothetical mental state, and the things I can have my actor do that are within the binderies of the law (originally there was a scene where he tries to climb a telephone pole and falls of repeatably).

What I learned about BBFC helped me understand the limits of the kind of comedy that I’m going for with this production (language, violence, etc.), which also helped me understand how to make something funny without having to be over the top or outrageous, even when I am doing slapstick and absurdist humour.