Saturday, May 22, 2010

Workplace Bully: What's the tone?

Here's a question for you while I'm busy working on answers from the comments thread and resting my hands: when you first heard the pitch for Workplace Bully, what did you imagine it would be like?

When you hear that it's a webseries of short one to two minute episodes about a bully victimising someone at work, what do you expect to see?

5 comments:

Emma said...

My first thought was inspired by The Office. I imagined lots of silence and workplace ambient noise plus that sort of zoom in zoom out documentary style camera work, incidents viewed across spaces etc. I imagined it being humourously voyeuristic.

After hearing it's a webseries I imagine it to be similar to what I have previously imagined but with lower production values and more raw emotion without so much deflective comedic value.

I don't imagine either to have a linear progression through time.

Debbie Cowens said...

My reaction was similiar to Emma's. The first response to Workplace Bully was comedy filmed in doco style. Something along the lines of The Office or The Thick of it, possibly with a bully similar to Jeff in Peep Show.

When you use the phrase webseries about a bully victimising someone at work, I associate that more with a drama. Possibly it's because most of the webseries I've seen have been more serious, but also I think the word 'victimising' tends to make me assume it's darker and serious.

d f mamea said...

just to be different to the above posters, i was thinking a stylistic riff on John Cleese's corporate videos - not so much the training bits but the 'dramatisations'.

i'll answer your second question with a question: how long is the web-series?

Karen said...

I've never watched much of The Office... slightly more of The Thick of It, but that kind of humour makes me feel pretty queasy

When I first skimmed this through to decide whether I was interested enough to contribute, the phrase that struck me was "a gentle observing of incidents from two peoples' lives that add up to a bigger story"... I guess I imagined a series of uncomfortable scenes(conversations? meetings? observations of people going about their work?) that initially seemed slightly unconnected, but reasonably quickly fitted together to show the pattern... with the audience realising what was happening slightly before the target of the bullying. I think the tone I imagined based on that was kind of intimate... following along with the characters and getting to know them, and with the wit appearing more spontaneous, rather than highly scripted. [dunno... I keep thinking of "My Life as a Dog"... the Swedish one I saw when i was a teenager, but am not sure how I'm connecting this]

Billy said...

In a way, it makes me expect something like a godawful government agency funded public service raising awareness of workplace bullying video. (Incidentally, has it occurred to you that you could possibly get it funded by camouflaging it as that?) That expectation, is, I think coloured by the fact that I can't think of anything like what you seem to be actually describing...