What Inspires You?

As mentioned already, the genre I chose for my blog was a satirical mockumentary and my personal influences were, the news, “The Odd Life of Timothy Green” and “The Office.”

Starting off, the news in general is a great inspiration for this mockumentary as outlets such as True Crime Daily post news documentaries on harrowing cases and the cuts from news reporters that read accounts on the situation to reenactments and actual clips from the scene are shown.

Next, The Odd Life of Timothy Green isn’t a comedy nor is it a real documentary, but the format is really similar to a documentary. To start off, the movie begins with Jim and Cindy Green, a married couple with no children who are filling out a form for an adoption. When the adoption agency woman was going through the form notices that there’s nothing written in the “Qualification” area; Jim and Cindy explain how there wasn’t enough space and convince the two workers to listen to their story of Timothy Green. The scene then fades into a flashback of last September where Jim and Cindy find out about Cindy’s infertility and are distraught about the news and the inability to have a child of their own. They decide to create a list of things that they would want in their future child and bury it in the yard before going to sleep, thus planting Timothy Green. The movie gives me the documentary vibe with the way it goes from the flashback with the Green family’s life with Timothy and them explaining the scenario to the adoption agency. The Odd Life of Timothy Green serves more as a shots and scenes influence to me than a plot driver, but it really did help me think about what type of genre that my partners and I agreed on.

Lastly, we have The Office. Although this is a show and not a film, it’s impossible to ignore the how it shaped the mockumentary genre with its wonderful 9 seasons of endless laughter and an overall break from the real world as it makes even the most jaded of situations a joke – an office. As per usual, every episode has a sequence of events, like in the episode “Stress Relief” – which is season five episode fourteen – where we watch Dwight plan out the fire drill. Even though the mockumentary my partners and I are planning consist of the recounting of events, The Office is still good inspiration as it opened us up to new options like following events throughout the day and having little snippets of the character’s thoughts through the documentary like footage of them alone.