Parody | MISSING THE MARK (Documentary)
Parody is one of my personal favourite modes of Comedy. I grew up with it as a kid watching parody music videos on YouTube and my favourite film is Surf’s Up (2007) which is a mockumentary (parody of the documentary style). So as soon as I saw that we were parodying a genre for our group exercises I knew exactly what genre I would pitch for.
When it came to planning our sketch as a group (with Jazz and Alex) it became hard for us to narrow down what exactly we wanted to do and how we could fit it into the short 3-minute time limit. Thankfully the first few sketch exercises taught me how to slowly chip away at parts and decide what was best to keep in the final cut.
Working in a group setting was very refreshing from the first lonely 3 weeks of exercises for me as I like bouncing ideas off of other people and collaborating on a film set. I think that I also work better in a group setting with people I work well with because it is not just me relying on and working towards the final product.
Filming the sketch went very smoothly, while we didn’t have a specific detailed shot list, we knew all of the shots that we would need for our sketch to work so we were only shooting for one and a half hours. After the shoot though I began to doubt whether our concepts were as funny so I was starting to feel worried about the edit.
We did not go out with super-specific roles but due to everyone’s joint understanding of the final goal, we were able to naturally spread the workload out fairly evenly. Jazz is the one that did the edit and when I saw the edit all my doubts about whether the sketch was funny or not left. I think this was due to stepping away from the piece for a few days which was a benefit we had from filming early, as well as Jazz’s editing style.
What I learned from this exercise is how important the edit and what your shots look like is when it comes to parody, because there are specific conventions that you need to break and make fun of as a maker of comedy and if your work does not match that, then the jokes isn’t being told to it’s fullest.