06/02/2020 - The Office “Downside” Episode Analysis

I am doing an analysis on an episode of the office. I am doing this, because it should give me a bigger idea of the fundamentals when it comes to doing a mockumentary. I am going to be looking at the camera angles, how the camera moves, how b-roll is used and anything else that could help me in the production of a mockumentary.

The first thing I noticed that I hadn’t really thought about but is useful to use is to have a couple shots at the beginning to introduce to the characters the actual location of the mockumentary.

In the office the first 30 seconds is just establishing shots; this is a good useful to know, because it shows the viewers the area of recording, and also some viewers that would work in these areas would then relate to as well. 

Another thing I noticed is that the camera zooms in and rotates a lot but doesn’t necessarly move position, it does move sometimes when the characters are walking, however when the characters are sitting down it genrally just zooms in and rotates to get the other characters reaction/dialogue.

This is also useful to know as it shows to me that I need to watch out for the amount the camera moves around, as if I move around too much it may lose the illution of a documentary

I also noticed that when a scene ends it is usually followed by some b-roll to help it transition into the next scene. This is a good tool as it allows for scenes to transition seemlessly.

This is very useful for me because not a lot of articles on how to make a mockumentary don’t really mention about b-roll and how useful it is to use as a bridge to join scenes together.

Another thing I noticed is that there is a few interviews this is pretty standard for documentaries as it gives the viewer time to understand a character.

This is also a useful tip for me to implement this into my work, because it will define the type of character they are.

15/01/2019 - “Mockumentaries - Everything You Need to Know”

I have found a video on how to make a mockumentary, this will give me some more tips on how to make a mockumentary which I will be able to implement into my own work.

In the video it talks abouts the definition of a mockumentary as defined by Merriam Webster he said that a mockumentary is “a facetious or satirical work presented in the style of a documentary” that isn’t really a tip, however it is good to know as then you can fully understand the meaning of a mockumentary.

The first tip is for your actor to sound as realistic as possible which sounds straight forward, but something they mention after this is that when Alan Owens was writing “A Hard Days Night” (a film about a band) he spent a lot of time with the beatles to make sure the script seemed genuine. So I can use this to help me as I am not sure what I am going to base my mockumentary on, however when I know I will make sure to find someone related to that topic and let them look over the script to see if they agree on it being genuine.

Another tip in the video that is related to the last paragraph is to improvise on speech if you don’t remember lines, this will make the finished product potentially better as there is no way for it not to seem genuine because even the actor has forgot the lines. This will be a useful tip because if an actor forgets the lines they will know to improvise for a potentially better shot.

09/01/2019 - How to Implement These Tips

The tips I have researched should be easily implemented into my work, mainly because a mockumentary doesn’t require a lot of equipment, such as I only need one camera, one main character with a fairly unheard of idea and also some random people to interview, and that is the main tips done. To get people to interview I will most likely go out with my actor and talk to a range of people, some from college, and maybe some from out of college campus, as they should react differently as they should be from a different generation. 

09/01/2019 - “11 Tips for Making a Mockumentary”

This is an article that I have found, It is useful because it is giving me some good tips to make my mockumentary the highest quality I can get.

The first and probably one of the most important tips, which is pretty obvious but can easily be overlooked, it is to “Find an Odd Subject” and it goes to say about how in the late 1950s the whole of the UK didn’t really know about Spaghetti so for an april falls prank the bbc made a 3 minute video called “Spaghetti Tree” which showed a family harvesting a spaghetti tree; Shortly after the video aired the BBC were flooded with calls asking how to grow a spaghetti tree. This is going to help me, because it basically shows as long as you control the filming environment and have a professional feel, people will tend to believe anything you say.

Another Tip that is quite helpful is to actually hold the camera with your hand. This is because a mockumentary needs to have the same feel as an actual documentary. This could easily be overlooked, but it will also help keep the just general documentary feel, also this is another tip but I feel it should be in the same included in this one is to only use 1 camera, or 2 if you really want to push it; this is, this is because it will give the feel of a tight budgeted documentary, which is a genuine thing for most documentaries, if you were to have 2 cameras it will allow for you to capture the reactions from the answers of the actor.

The final tip I am going to mention from this article, is to interview genuine people rather than actors, as they will tend to give a funnier performance than a actor. This is because they will be surprised by the questions or answers the actor has said, a good example of this technique is from “Da Ali G Show” where the actor who played Ali G was interviewing a member of the FBI.

Maher, M. (2015). 11 Tips for Making a Mockumentary. [Blog] The Beat. Available at: http://premiumbeat.com/blog/11-tips-making-mockumentary/ [Accessed 9 Jan. 2020].

09/01/2019 - What Makes A Good Mockumentary

I am going to be looking at articles on mockumentaries, these will help me make a high quality mockumentary as I should be learning from the professionals and indie film makers.

06/01/2019 - What We Do In The Shadows

I have decided to look at “What We Do In The Shadows” because it is a mockumentary which is what I am trying to do for the practical side of this test. This is a good mockumentary to look at, because it has the regular elements of a mockumentary which is talking to the camera, and generally just acting like and actual realistic representation of life, however it also uses vfx to represent the vampires powers, such as invisibility, flying and other superpowers.

11/12/2019 - Ideas For Project

I have looked at 4 different types of comedy, as I have chosen comedy as my specialism, I looked at British comedy, American comedy, horror parody and also mockmentaries. I have chosen to do a mockumentary as I enjoy the aesthetic of it. I enjoy the idea of the actor trying to make it serious and them trying to talk to the camera. 

Project 6 - Dank Energy Advertisement Evaluation

I have finalised my Project 6 – Energy Drink advertisement, I am going to be evaluating all the features of my work and going to be discussing how I could have done certain things differently to allow a better outcome for my work.

To begin, I chose to base my advertisement on an energy drink, I had made my choice by using primary research (a survey) to get the best topic for an advert, the three choices were, Headphones, energy drink, or a phone. The survey responses showed that people were interested in headphones or an energy drink as there was a split decision, which allowed me to chose one of the two. For my energy drink I predicted that the target audience would be teens, to young adults. I predicted this because a lot of people in that age range play sports and are usually very active and most young people will just drink an energy drink because of the taste. My survey seems to agree with my prediction, because I had sent my survey around my class which has that exact age range in and half of them had been interested in an ad for an energy drink.

I believe I reached my Target Audience, because in the same survey that I mentioned earlier 75% of the responses wanted the advert to have a comical element to it, and I believe I put a good amount of comedy into the “Dank Energy Ad” another question in the survey asked “How long should an advert be” this showed to be a very different thing for every one as there is no solid conclusion on what my target audience would want an ad to be. To improve my target audience, I could have gone and asked around my college if they would be interested in buying an energy drink, how often they drink energy drink, what is about energy drinks they like. This would have given me more of a specific target audience as I could have fine tuned it to that specific audience.

I am now going to talk about the research I had done for my advertisement. To begin with I watched some adverts for other energy drinks to see what they all have in common, I watched the old tango advertisements, and even though Tango isn’t really an energy drink, it still was good to research, something that the tango advert, redbull and monster adverts have in common is that all of them seem to bring out a certain character, in tango they have an orange man, in monster there was an actual monster that comes out of you when you drink it in the one that I saw, and in redbull a genie gave a man a redbull, because it gave him superpowers. So, this helped me, because all of the energy drinks had given the user some sort of superpower, which inspired me to make the punch line of my advertisement, to give you superpowers even though the actual advertisement doesn’t say it. This type of advertisement is called the “reception theory” which basically means the creator (me) encodes a secret message in the advertisement (the drink gives you superpowers) and the viewer discovers the message and is then interested.

I also done research into other strategies of advertising and I had come across three strategies known as Ethos, Pathos, and logos. Now these are certain ways of making your advertisement appeal to your viewer in different ways. Ethos is showing emotion to make you viewer interested, so the foundations trying to get water fountains in west Africa use Ethos, whereas pathos is using someone that is of high regard to advertise your product so the viewer wants to buy it as well, such as an advertisement I had seen where the rock was drinking a certain milk, which makes the viewer want to buy that milk as well. The Logos strategy is just as simple as using the features to sell the product itself, like in the iPhone 11 Pro advertisements they are showing the new camera, because it has three different lenses. I chose to go with the Ethos strategy, because like I said earlier my survey responses favoured the idea of having a comical advert, and laughing is an emotional response, so I believe that they fitted together very well.

For even more research I looked into what a young executive would wear on their day to day job, such as a suit jacket, smart shirt, and trousers, and me and others actors brought in that type of clothing to make the advertisement look as authentic as possible.

To improve my research, I could have looked in different types of research, as a lot of my research has come from the internet, whether that be analysing advertisements on YouTube, or looking at what a young executive would wear on Google Images. I could have looked into some books on how to advertise a product, I could have also emailed an advertisement company to get some tips on how to advertise a product the best way.

I am now going to talk about the actual final video and what I like about it and how it could have been improved if I had more time to do so. I will be starting with the shots, I believe the shots were quite nice as they were nicely framed, and also they kept the third marketer out of shot and surprised the viewer that he was there in the times when he said his line, I also found that idea funny, because there was this idea of the two serious business workers having a real conversation then the weird, not so serious one comes is panned onto to say his funny line. I would’ve changed two shots looking back on it now, the first thing is I would’ve added a shot where there was a wide angle lens on the camera and the first time Owen (the third marketer) talks, I would’ve had the camera parallel to the table to show how big the table is and to show the comical value that we didn’t need a table that big. The other thing I would’ve changed is for that last shot when the camera work is very shaky and at some moments struggles to focus, in a perfect world I would’ve had a stabilizer to make the camera deadly smooth so my camera man would’ve only had to concentrate on the camera focusing well.

Now for the VFX work of it there is only a small amount of VFX in the video, however I would change it looking back on it, because a few things went wrong with that small part. The first thing to go  wrong was I forgot to bring in a black marker which essentially makes the tracker in Adobe After Effects a lot easier to use, but because I forgot to bring one in I wasn’t able to put a black dot on my thumb for the fire to be tracked to, so it didn’t track as well as it could have, another thing that I wanted to do with the fire is to just make it look a lot more bigger and dangerous as I think that would have looked a lot better, however one thing that I was happy with is that I made the flames light glow and reflect of my thumb which gave it a better and more real look.

With the Audio I definitely would have changed everything about it, because I didn’t use an actual mic which I should have used to replace the hissing background noise, this would have made the video a lot more clean and professional, I also should’ve added some music in the background so it didn’t sound so flat. I also forgot to add any sound to the fire on my thumb which makes the fire a lot less realistic and impressive.

Overall, I am pleased with this project as I found it fun to make and fun to edit. It was my first time using a 50mm lens which I enjoyed using. There is a few things that I can work on such as audio, VFX, and one or two shots, however the finished product shows improvement in my work which I am pleased with.

Project 6 - Energy Drink Ad

05/12/2019 - Behind The Scenes

Here is some behind the scenes of the video I am producing, the person in the smart shirt is the actor and the script is in front of him, and the boy behind the camera was just setting the camera up ready for the shot.

25/11/2019 - Energy Drink AD Read Through 2 Evaluation

Today I made a second read through of the script with camera angles to understand how I want to make it look like, and a bit more acting in it rather than sitting by a table reading the script.

WHAT WENT WELL:

One thing that went well, was the camera angles I think, as it showed how I imagined the video in my head, and also the way the camera panned from one of the marketers that you knew was there to the hidden marketer that said the most weird things was a comical effect that I enjoyed the idea of.

WHAT I NEED TO IMPROVE:

In the video the quality of the camera could be improved, but I think the reason why the quality was worse than usual is, because we were in a rush to get this done and edited; when I film the final version I will get the best quality video I get.

25/11/2019 - Energy Drink AD Readthrough 2

21/11/2019 - Prop List

Here is an image for a typical executive, I’m going to use the items he is wearing as a template for a prop list.

I am going to need:

Tie Watch Shirt Blazer Briefcase Suit Trousers Smart Shoes

it might also help if my actors do their hair style in a smart way rather than messy just so it looks a bit more professional. I am also probably not going to be able to get all of this for each actor but I am going to try to get the most I can.

20/11/2019

20/11/2019 -  Props for Advert

I am looking for props I am going to need in my advert and because they are marketers they are going to need look like marketers so here is what a normal digital marketer would typically look like, they would wear smart clothes like shirt, tie, and suit trousers, I am going to edit my actors face on this character to get an accurate look of how the actor should look.

18/11/2019

According to Walter Murch the most important part of a film is emotion, and if you are going to reduce one thing in a film this pie chart will help because it shows the most important features to a film.