Trams, Rentals & Instrumentals has undergone quite a revolution since Bottle Rocket’s first brainstorming sessions. Our initial proposal was to create three separate short films, evoking the spirit of Melbourne – its culture and its people. We even had a fairly fleshed out concept for one of them, ‘A Fine Man‘, following a middle-aged Myki inspector and his quest for a partner who doesn’t despise his job. However, the triptych of shorts proved to be a fairly unwieldy format, and after a consult with our tutor, the idea for Trams, Rentals & Instrumentals began to form.
Trams, Rentals & Instrumentals is a half hour mockumentary series, inspired by such great mock-doc series as ‘Summer Heights High’ and ‘Parks and Recreation’. It follows three separate characters – Liam, who we kept from our initial brainstorm, Valentina, a highly strung real-estate agent, and Martin, a self-centered busker with delusions of grandeur. With these characters, we were attempting to evoke the sense of Melbourne that we’d initially discussed for our short films. As a Myki inspector, Liam allowed us to explore the public transport sector, which we felt was a large part of the Melbourne experience for a lot people. Martin would busk in the CBD, obviously a big feature of Melbourne, while Valentina’s work as a real-estate agent enabled us to showcase some of the outer suburbs – basically, we wanted Melbourne itself to be a character in the series.
Our major question in the creation of this project was how we could faithfully and successfully recreate the mockumentary genre. This meant a careful study of those aforementioned mock-doc works that we drew upon, examining the technical and stylistic flourishes that we enjoyed, and shooting test clips and going through rehearsals to see if we could recreate them. One example of this was the mockumentary tendency to crash-zoom on an actor’s reaction for comedic effect. While it looked easy, it’s tricky to pull off smoothly, and required multiple takes to achieve. We were also struck by the suspension of disbelief employed by these series in regards to the camera’s point-of-view. For instance, a scene in Summer Heights High might begin with a camera inside a room with the actors, before cutting to a hallway outside, watching the action through a window, and then cutting once more to a figure down the corridor – all ostensibly filmed by a static documentary camera crew. As viewers, we tend not to notice this while watching, and Bottle Rocket paid particular attention to how these series pulled off this effect.
Our aim, in the end, was to create two short mockumentary sequences following two of our leads (Valentina and Martin). We intended to draw on the appropriate generic conventions to do this, and the results are below.