Week 7 was the beginning of our major project, and with our group of 5, there were a number of ideas thrown around. We had some idea of how we wanted to go about our creative process, as we quickly came up with a super basic premise of what we were inspired by, with a lot of the group wanting to delve into the mockumentary genre. We realised the fine line between inspiration and copying, as we were heavily influenced by the series ‘American Vandal’ (2017-2018). 

(Still taken from American Vandal Season 1)

Our brainstorm came to a basic premise being formed, with our final piece wanting to recreate the styles of a crime documentary, with dramatic lighting and interviews in front of a black background. We decided the documentary could be circulating an incident on a sitcom set, which would allow us to create parodical and hyperbolic characters who we could utilise to create some of the comedy. 

We wanted the form of the piece to be episodic, as it would allow for us to have the first episode end on a cliffhanger. The reasoning behind this is that even though we are creating a “mockumentary”, we still need to match the style of the original format, which includes building audience suspense to maintain engagement with the piece. This was something we were aware of from our week 4 projects, in which we needed to create a parody piece. For these steps of creating a parody, we looked back at Toplyn, J. (2014), “Parody Sketches” in Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 239–261. For our piece to be convincing, the step of studying the stylistic elements of the genre we were parodying was crucial. For this, we decided to collectively make a vision board which also served as a reference for us. 

During this week we also had to allocate roles for pre-production, production and post-production. More specifically for the pre-production, where we had to decide who would be writing the first draft. Lewis put his hand up for this, so we fleshed out more details of the premise so that his job would be easier. We also were aware of how technically ambitious this piece was, so had to play to our individual strengths to ensure that everything from the sound to the lighting setups was at a high level.