Mockumentary Research - The Office UK

Another mockumentary that i looked into was The Office UK, i have never seen this show before, but have seen other work from the creator Ricky Gervais and have obviously heard of this show before from its great popularity in the UK. I decided to stick to the UK version only as this has much more of the comedy that we would be trying to match in My Name Is John. This show is now over a 15years old, but is still one of the biggest mockumentary style show. The Show itself follows a character called David Brent and his co workers in a paper company, from what i an see the show, never really explains, the reason behind the cameras, but i would say it is mainly a mockumentary based around following the main character, of David Brent as apart from the interview scenes David Brent, is the only character that looks at the camera. This is a nice effect as it means that the camera can be anywhere in the scene and as long as you have the main character looking at the camera, then you still have established that there is a camera there at all times. Again the comedy i this show is something that is vital for this show to work, but this might be again something hard to replicate. The scenes are normally laid out with a hand held camera you can see this by the fact that the camera is very free flowing, i get that this might be difficult to do i our film as our camera are very heavy and we really don't have the specialized equipment to do hand held correctly. The camera in the shots goes with a mixture of pans and straight cuts with even zooms in shots to give that mockumentary style. The last thing to talk about is the interview set up this is a very simple but effective shot, it is normally very close up, against a blank background, these shots are normally not very long and are just there to set up a character or the next scene, this is why i think that these interviews shots work.

 This quick scene here demonstrates a lot of the things that i have mentioned above, including the flowing camera, the fact that only David looks at the camera, and the use of pans in the show.