Crime Documentary Self Reflection

 This is my critical self reflection:
These are the questions for the critical self reflection

CR 1 - How do your products represent social groups or issues?
CR 2 - How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
CR 3 - How do your products engage with the audience?
CR 4 - How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

Branding is important as it gives an identity for our documentary which makes it easier to share a message to the audience and creates a powerful image of the documentary. For a crime documentary, we need lots of elements that will show that it is a crime documentary. Visual similarities are important for branding as they convey the document’s theme and match the expectation from the audience in the thumbnails. For crime documentaries they have a certain type of visual such as a medical mis en scene and using dark and muted colour themes to show the seriousness of the crime.The purpose for each product is to raise awareness about how bullying can impact a student’s life especially when they don’t get help from adults surrounding them such as in the clip, teachers. The document aims to highlight how neglect from adults can cause student’s mentally suffering and causes them to not think straight, in our case tampering with medications. According to the theory of stuarts hall which is the preferred meaning, oppositional is when the audience rejects the message and negotiated is when audience has a balanced perspective. Oppositional reading by the audience will mean that the crime documentary oversimplifies the bullying nature and blaming adults for it, which the audience may believe that they are just blaming adults such as teacher without thinking of other factors that may happen and oppositional reading by audience contrasted with the clip’s message for the audience. However, there is also negotiated reading which the audience understand the key message of the documentary but knows that its multi situational which means that audience can see from both sides.

Our target audiences in these crime documentaries are students, medical professionals and educators as they are most likely to be interested in psychological crime and medical related crime. The demographic chosen for our documentary is teenagers to semi adult from the age 17-25 who are still in the education or early career stage of their life. This is as the settings happened in school, which can relate and connect more to audiences in those ages. The actors are also young adults and teenagers which enhance the impact of the clip. On the other hand, psychographic for our clip is audiences who have strong interest in movies such as mystery and psychological crime in meds which will enjoy plot twists and discuss it as they are interested in that topic. Our documentary contains a narrative that flows from a happy start as the scene is bright and cheerful, starting from the school’s and teachers saying thank you for being a part of regents school. However it takes a turn towards a darker theme and suspenseful storyline. Uses and Gratification is used to reflect diversion where audience watched suspenseful movie to relax and as an escape from daily life, where personal identity if for audience which are into medics helping them reflect and relate to personal experience, Social relationships to talk about it to other audience esp those who have the same interest as they have, and lastly surveillance which they use just for insight in the consequences of bullying. The audience will be attracted by using the thumbnail of our documentary as our thumbnail uses mis en scene such as blood splatter on the prescription which can give the message of harm and breach of trust in the meds. This is shown also using muted colours to show the seriousness of the crime documentary and attract the audience.

 

Crime documentaries often use mise-en-scène with realistic props, set-ups, and lighting to give the narrative a sense of authenticity. These are things we utilise to make our documentary look genuine and interesting. We use dark and low key lighting for mystery and suspense and bright soft lighting whenever there is something positive going on during the film of just doing interviews. As the story progresses, drawing from a light-hearted beginning to developing into more complex on-screen drama, it goes through changes in lighting which help change the emotion of the documentary. Mis en scene also improve the credibility of a documentary where they used medicines, dark clothes and settings. Sound also plays an important role as crime documentaries utilise voiceover narration, background sounds and music to narrate story and evoke emotions. On top of that we also stuck the line by incorporating voiceover narration to describe the happenings and background sounds to create a setting for the viewer. The emotional and suspenseful moments are carefully annotated by the dramatic music underscoring, which adds to the intensity of the crime documentary. Our editing, especially quicker cuts in the tense parts and elongated transitions to emphasise certain bits,into more normal territory for tension and narrative. We also introduced a few crazy effects, like the hand-held jitter camera movements to make our documentary feel more alive and emotional. This allowed for our crime documentary to be different from the conventions but it still fell within the norms of a traditional documentary.

The social groups in the crime documentary are students as victims (also murderer), Investigator, and nurse. Social groups can be represented as said by stuart hall encoding theory which explains how the audience interprets messages from media. The preferred reading is that students are able to do bad things when mistreated, nurses are usually suspected as they are the ones holding the medicines, teachers are always around when bullying happens yet did nothing, and how investigators are smart and diligent who are determined to solve the case. This has been shown from the use of camera angles such as closeups on the investigator’s scene to build up suspense as the investigator was looking straight at the camera gives the sense of urgency and intensity which matches the stereotype of investigators. The issue from our documentary is that there was a student contaminating the medicines as the student has been mistreated by everyone including the school as the student was bullied but the school did nothing even when they knew which causes the student to act badly and seek revenge. The preferred reading in our documentary is mistreating students such as bullying can cause things such as murder as they are angry with the situation and were seeking revenge. This is shown from the tampered medication which in the clip we made is shown using camera angle close ups of tampering in medication which emphasises the student’s action. However, this causes the nurse to be blamed for tampering with meds as the nurse has access. This is shown in the clip by camera angle of a medium shot of the nurse looking hesitant which leads audiences to believe that she is the suspect. This confirms the representation of nurses as she is the only one with access to the medicines. We also use stereotypes for the investigators usually they are portrayed as smart, detailed, cautious, determined which is how the investigator acts in our project. They are all represented to convey a message to the audience about our crime documentary.