Week 7
This week we screened our final group sketches for Assignment #2, and begun the passage towards our final media product. Based on previous group sketches, Nia, Zach, Yusuf and I knew we would have a similar vision and comedy style that we wanted to emulate in our final project for the studio. I had been set on making a mockumentary since before semester had begun, so I was elated when my group were also down to make something in that realm.
We were heavily inspired by the comedy aspects and style of the series American Vandal, a comedy-documentary about an incident that occurs at a high school and the students that uncover the truth surrounding the crime and other school drama along the way. As we are also a group of sitcom-lovers, we wanted to include that as an aspect of the film, also making sure our narrative didn’t overlap with that of American Vandal too much. Hence, we settled on the premise of an incident occurring on a sitcom set, centred around a set of wacky characters with humorous secrets. We have not yet ironed out the details of these characters or the incident that occurs, but we have currently decided that we want this story to take place over two 10 minute episodes so it would feel like a series.
The biggest comedy theory we discussed when brainstorming ideas was benign violation. We want to take both genres of sitcom and mockumentary and commit to the tropes of both. This is especially the case for the documentary parts of the short film as that’s what made American Vandal so successful as it really takes the tropes of documentary/true crime seriously whilst cutting on the absurd to have comedic effects.
Our group contract and vision board: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rHSXvnQhAbTrI2WDlKHQ5PsEFaJ1cez-6AsBTcBd1DQ/edit?usp=sharing
References:
- Warren, C. & McGraw, A.P. (2015), “Benign Violation Theory” in Attardo, S. (ed), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies, Los Angeles: SAGE Reference.