Mockumentary

by bam

The capstone of the Storytelling series, and the only course in it that requires the others. A mockumentary is invented work wearing the clothes of work that may not invent, which means you cannot make one well without knowing exactly why documentary conventions persuade. This course reads the True track backwards: what each convention promises, how a fiction borrows it, and where the borrowing becomes a lie. It covers the persuasion grammar of documentary, comedy and satire as separate engines, the character who does not know they are being watched, the frame of an audience that is in on it, the 1938 Welles broadcast and the panic that mostly did not happen, deepfakes and synthetic media as the same problem at industrial scale, and the one line that separates satire from fraud. Ends by asking you to make both a real documentary segment and a false one about the same subject.