Addressing Key Concepts.

I wanted to show that my film that I am working on is in the comedy genre. Specifically a mockumentary. In order to proceed with this, I included many tropes from the mockumentary genre. For example, I included many short clips of interviewees talking directly to the camera. The main influence for this was The Office. I wanted to imitate comical confessions of Ricky Gervais and provide dramatic irony as characters are not aware of each other’s insults. To give my film the feel of a documentary, I have not used lots of cuts between scenes. For example, there’s a scene when student shoes are mentioned and we pan down to these as the cameraman is reacting to what’s going on instead of following a script. I tried to make the documentary as authentic as possible by putting in slang that is accurate to the south London school I filmed in, or that I tried to represent.

I will be looking at a small budget for the making of my mockumentary.  Approximately the budget for my film will be around one million pounds. The reason being for this is because the mockumentary will be shot in the school, and there is not really any need of going offsite to shoot different scenes for my mockumentary. What makes a budget expensive is the actors that are hired, the set pieces in action movies that are shown, the cameras that are needed in order to film more than one take. A script is not usually devised when mockumentaries are being made, for example, it’s been believed in Borat that most of the interactions have been improvised by Borat, and the American citizens think Borat is a real person and costumes needed for the characters to wear, For example, Borat was shown only wearing two costumes, ones a swimming suit, and the other is a professional suit. However, with my film, a lot of it was staged, there was not much improvising to do throughout the filming. Scenes in the mockumentary will usually be shot in one take. A lot of small production companies came together to make Borat but it was distributed by a large distribution company, 20^th Century Fox. They use small production companies because big production companies are working on bigger blockbusters, and mockumentaries are not really a popular genre. The mockumentary genre got popular during the 1980s, they are quite new to cinema, which might be a reason why it is often overlooked by big film companies.

My target audience is teenagers in their early and late teens. The reason being for this is because the film is set in a school, and we are parodying aspects about school that the students are known to laugh at. My focus groups said that they like the idea of a mockumentary set in a school, but are concerned that it could make fun of some sensitive topics that students struggle with this modern day. For example, bullying and discrimination towards other people, and students who struggle in exam situations. I am planning to satisfy these audiences by still having the setting of a regular school, and parody real life situations that would happen in a school. The audience is likely to be left wing because left wing people have been knowing to laugh at mockumentaries because they are less politically respected and a majority of my respondents for my questionnaire about mockumentaries were left wing, and teachers will also be interested in this film because they want to see how they are depicted by students, and relate back to when they were students.  Also school is something that everybody can relate to because everyone has been to school at one point in their life.

I focused on age and class representations in my film. For example, I portrayed the teacher being out of touch with the kids, eventhough in the trailer, the teacher denies that and pretends he’s in touch with the kids, when he is actually quite posh secretly. The students we are using multiple stereotypes for each student. One stereotype is the really informal, misbehaving teenager who uses slang words instead of speaking in proper English. I did this because that is one popular stereotype that is known in school environments and my film will be shot in south-west London. Another stereotype is that overly achieving, studious students who wear glasses, and effect this has on the audience is that I want the audience to see that people who study a lot are not completely uncool, like how they are depicted in the movies. Another representation that I have used in age, because we have a lot of teenagers shown in our film. The two main characters in our film are a teacher and a student. Both the teacher and students are quite posh, but they are imitating behaviour associated in the working class. The teacher fails to imitate the working class, for example during the interview scene, he refers to himself with an informal nickname “OG” because his surname is Garrett and also, in another scene, a student asks him about his shoes and uses the word “crepes” which he does not understand. The inspiration for the teacher was Jack Whitehall’s performance in Bad Education. I liked that because he was trying to be an unconventional teacher but he fails, and not only students laughed at him, other teachers laughed at him as well.