Unit G324 - Short Film - Film Review Research

To create a successful short film in the style of a mockumentary i need to read reviews of both Mockumentary films and television programmes. Reading and researching reviews of mockumentary films will also be useful when it comes to writing a film review ourselves. I'm going to look at both solely online reviews and online magazine reviews so i can gain a varied and impartial view on mockumentaries in the eyes of reviewers. I'm going to look at reviews for Confetti, Drop Dead Gorgeous and The Office. I'm going to read at least two different reviews for each film or TV programme, I'll be using websites such as Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic. Then to get a nicely varied collection of reviews I'll look at online film magazines such as Empire online and Totalfilm.

Instead of reading reviews on The Office i chose Borat instead as it's a film and the reviews were easier to find and compare. After reading reviews for each of the three films i found that the thing that really made the mockumentary was the cringe factor, it's huge in Confetti and in Borat but not so much in Drop Dead Gorgeous, which gained the worst reviews. Although, one good point made about Drop Dead Gorgeous was that it did self-reflection and self-parody very well, as this was the environment the writer had been around and grown up in she was very accurate in her parodies, i think i'll be able to take this point and use it to my advantage as i'm around the "band environment" a lot. One point that reviewers generally didn't like was the improvisation involved in Confetti, this is why i'm writing a script, i think improvisation would be interesting to try but you end up doing a lot of filming and a lot more editing which isn't practical for this film, however we will let the cast improvise a little to add realism to the film but I will have the script as a base to the film.