When joined together with Farah, Ilona, and Kathryn, we wanted to explore this idea of the cemetery’s inhabitants. We began brainstorming how we could delve into the daily perspective of ghosts in the cemetery — especially a cemetery with graves of famed people that attract tourists all year long.
We were inspired by the American sitcom “The Office”, a mockumentary which explores the personal and professional lives of employees in an office in Pennsylvania. The reason “The Office” is such a popular series is because of its realisticness to daily life as an American nine-to-fiver and how the series presents the characters in their ordinary, routine environment.
We decided to create our own spin-off of “The Office” called “The Cemetery”. We wanted to satirize the celebrity aspect of Pere Lachaise by creating ironic characters; they are common people and perhaps even a little bit out of place in the cemetery. We created five different characters: Amy, Nicole, Wes, Sascha, and Godefroy. You can read the detail character descriptions here.
We set the first episode during the daytime, to present how the characters are during their common day-to-day encounters with one another — instead of setting the show at night time as many ghost stories take place then. The fact there are so many people buried in this cemetery, some old, some young, some parents, grandparents, kids all coming from different generations with sometimes a grave for all the family or a grave for only one person, it seems like each grave represented their house in a big town and each one having its own address in the 24 or 48 division, it really felt like there was a community of people living here, except they’re all dead.
It was challenging not to cross the thin line that separates funny and disrespectful. We were very careful to stay ethically and politically correct since the topic is a very sad and personal one. I believe we have successfully achieved our goal. The video was described as funny, interesting and out of the box. I believe we could have been more successful if we had more knowledge on the material used, more time and a better practice in acting.
Here is the link to the video: The Cemetery-1rfzefh
