At Home Mockumentary

August 6, 2001 - Mockumentaries have become all the rage. The most popular of the mockumentary are films such as "This is Spinal Tap," "Waiting for Guffman", "The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human," and the phenomenon "Blair Witch Project." Many people have watched these films over and over again so many times that they’ve developed their own cult followings. Millions of people all across the country can quote each movie line for line. And one customer found a way to use the X10 XCam2 to make her own mockumentary.

Annette Francis considers herself the "penultimate ’Mockumentary’ connoisseur." She loves these farcical stories which are made to look and sound just like real life. "Every time I watch one of these," Annette says, "I can point to any one of those crazy characters and say, ’I know these guys.’" And she can really appreciate them being that she's a "Psych Major," in college. She gets a lot of practice in her classes by watching these programs.

On one occasion Annette was given a class project in which she had to do a presentation on understanding the differences in people who are honest, and those who are not. She had learned ways to recognize the differences between the two types of people. "What a perfect opportunity for me to make my own mockumentary," she decided. Rather than study some book, or watch someone else’s study project, she decided, "my friends are just as capable of a study as anyone, so why not give it a try?" And try she did.

"I didn’t have a lot of money, so I purchased a couple of XCam2 security cameras for the project." Then she put her VCR into a cloth bag, headed to her favorite after-school hangout, a local restaurant where her and her friends gathered from time to time to get together after classes. Once there, she hooked up the receiver to the VCR. Then she placed each camera where it would get the maximum coverage of each of her friends. Once that was all set, she put her ScanPad in hand, and invited her friends to join her. "We were each given topics that we may or may not know something about, and were told to talk about them as if we were authorities about that subject."

After the conversation was done, Annette went through the tape and prepared for her turn in front of the class. When that day came, she presented excerpts of the tape, and talked about observations. "It was easy to tell that the guy talking about physics was making everything up, but that’s just because nothing he said made sense," she said. "But others weren’t so easy to figure out. I learned a lot about just watching people and the differences in their behavior when they believe they know what they’re talking about and when they don’t."

A valuable lesson indeed. One which many customers are learning for themselves through the use of X10 products.

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