The Mockumentary Treatment

Mockumentary Treatment

Concept
A camera crew follows an eccentric former record holder as he battles with depression and attempts to cheat his way back into the Guiness Book of World Records.

Genre and Tone
The movie is a Mockumentary with dark comedic undertones. The film is made to appear like it’s a documentary when actually everything is staged and acted.

Story:
The Setup
The camera crew lands in a small town in the home of Rod Parker, a former world record holder for most tennis balls fit inside somebody’s mouth. He has the certificate from Guinness posted on his wall. A picture of Rod with all the tennis balls in his mouth is shown. He explains to the crew how he broke his jaw in a car accident and as a result is unable to do the tennis ball trick anymore. He explains the agony he went through when he heard some romanian guy had beat his record by four tennis balls.

The new record holder and the attempted suicide.
The crew goes to the house of the man who beat Rod’s record. He explainshow Rod sends him hate mail and death threat and expresses worry for Rod’s well-being. The crew returns to Rod’s house and find him trying to kill himself.

The Idea
The director of the movie points out to Rod that the one thing that will make him happy is the thrill of getting back into the book. He fully agrees. Since he doesn’t have much other things that he can do, he devises a plan to cheat his way back to acheiving another record. He decides to invite a representative from Guiness to come and watch him drink the most water in the span of only one minute.

The Record attempt
With the help of the camera crew, he switches the representative’s regulation Guiness approved stopwatch with a faulty one that after five minutes, only shows one minute to have gone by. While the man intently watches the stopwatch for five minutes, Felanie goes above and beyond the record, but ends up drowning.

Camera and Lighting: The camera and lighting will have a very real feel to to make it seem like a documentary.

Music and Special Effects
Music will be sad and suspenful. Not much special effects will be used other than editing a picture showing tennis balls in Rod’s mouth.