In some ways Mae Day is a sort of proto-Lost in La Mancha. Incidental footage and anything else available is used to create a film that would have at least some sort of measured success. Mae Day does a decent enough job at this, though its 10-minute length means that there isnt much depth given and, well, student films fall through all the time. That part of the story isnt particularly interesting, and it seems like the original idea wouldve been a much better way of using everyones time. In this way its a decent bailout video for the students grades, but not much more.

Now, what I really like about the short is that while half of it is about this failed documentary, half of it is Smith and Mosier making fun of their classmates, the schools faculty and documentary form in general. The pair finds what theyre putting together utterly ridiculous and theyre not afraid to say this, albeit in a highly ironic fashion. Keeping themselves in silhouette as if theyre informants is done to parody bad TV documentaries of the time, as are their overly dramatic pronouncements about what theyd done. Smith in fact wrote all of their interview dialogue beforehand in order to maximize the films ridiculousness.