Film Documentary

This blog post will include my final documentary project

This is the link incase the YouTube link got taken down.

Gdrive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sNhg5v4ZcZE2-vDlSLFQ5SwCcYssnR8S/view?usp=sharing

Video:

Thumbnail:

Critical Reflection

This will be my critical reflection for our documentary project. 

Questions to be answered:

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

My critical reflection:

Our documentary project titled ‘Not so Good’ is a project made in less than 2 months and includes a typical documentary genre, crime. Our story would simply be about how handling a rejection in the wrong way could be fatal to both parties. Our documentary will be representing both genders using male actors and also females as we are targeting both genders for our documentary. Genders are one of many demographics of our targetted audience. We are also aiming to target people aged 17 and above as they would be mature enough to see explicit content without remaking them. Nationality comes next and we are planning to target the Indonesian audience by not only using the English language for foreigners but also the Indonesian language for Indonesian students or just Indonesians in general. We are representing how the male audience couldn’t handle rejection especially when madly in love. This often happens at our age now where students are in love with each other and when the rejection comes they change into completely different people. The female audience, however, is represented as innocent and high in power as they are powerful enough to change a man completely. This is shown through the slow-paced rejection scene to show how important the moment is to Bagus. Our documentary could be generated with murder and kidnapping as the sudden disappearance of both actors was kept mysterious. This is to show how murder and kidnapping are a sin and could be highly disadvantageous to other parties. This is shown using interviews where we introduced anyone we know to what things they know about Bagus. We will also use general conventions such as dark lighting, suspenseful non-diegetic sound, or dark outfits when discussing the negative sides of Bagus. Our documentary are also targeted at the Indonesian audience due to the slang being used. Slangs are one of the ways we can represent a certain culture as different parts of the world use different slang to communicate. Another one would be how boys do not know how to handle rejection thus doing things they shouldn't have done. This helps us reach out to our targetted audience using representations in our documentary.

Other than to target an audience, a product has to find a way to engage with the audience. Film industries have used these types of methods and made their movie more captivating for the audience. While ours, will include both male and female actors the age of 17 to make the audience feel more relatable to the condition the actors would be in. Our target audience is from the age of 17 and above which makes using actors of the same age a great decision to make the audience feel more engaged. As we target adults who find documentaries interesting we made our documentaries with no parents involved inside of the video. This shows how a parent figure is important for a child’s life and a certain problem can be saved from just being there. Back to our first target audience, kids during their 17 will go through lots of different stages of growth and the situation Bagus was in can be every teen’s case. Our documentary will focus on rejection and life after rejection to show the audience how important it is for us to keep our mental health stable and never be overly stressed as we would do dangerous things. According to the uses and gratification theory by Bulmer and Kahtz, there are 4 uses for what we will perform. Diversion, which means using our documentary to distract themselves from the real world, can also be used for surveillance as it is necessary to always try solving problems without anything to do with harming. As for personal identity audience watching our documentary might start replicating him and seeing him as an idol to follow. As for social relationships, the audience who is handling the same situation right now can help other audiences that already have the problems solved. Our thumbnail also included general conventions such as red text which helps attract more customers as that's what a red text does. We also forgot to put a hermeneutic code where we didnt show if Bagus has anything to do with the disappearance of the female actor. This would make the audience wonder if the disappearance of both of them is related or not. We also chose to use subtitles for our video as some parts of it have the Indonesian language. To fully target both Indonesians and Foreigners we would need to use subtitles. 

Creating a targetted audience is simple but advertising the documentary is as important. Branding is when companies extend the life span of their product and differentiate their product from other objects. Branding improves the value of the product which could be used for differentiating our documentaries with others. One of the ways we can implement branding knowledge inside this project is through our thumbnail which consists of our title and some pictures. What we made, is 2 sides of Bagus our main character, where 1 side shows his happy phase looking so cheerful and enthusiastic while the other side is the total opposite. Bagus will look less happy and more sinister which puts a meaning for the audience to decode and makes them wonder why is there 2 sides to him. His depressed side happened due to receiving no answer from someone he sees romantically. The rejection changes not only his attitude but also his overall daily activity. The rejection caused the female actor’s life and this helps promote the dangers of murder and the potential threats of a mishandled rejection phase. The simple meaning of our documentary is that kidnapping and murder are never the right solution for everything in this world. It is something not even worth a last resort. Raising awareness of these types of decisions can reduce murder thoughts and suicidal behaviours that could be decoded by the audience through this documentary of ours. Using 2 languages for our documentary is unique. We also linked the ending scene of our documentary and our thumbnail using the same colour and font. This makes both interlinked and connected to make a better flow with the audience. 

According to my team’s research, general conventions included close-up shots of the actor or any sort of scene to show the facial expression that could contain meaning. Close-up up-shots are also taken to hint isolation between the interviewer and the interviewee. We used this method when recording the interview where we zoomed in on his face which implies to the audience to show how serious the situation is. Before researching I thought about how static shots could improve the scene making the audience focus more on the big details aside from any other songs. Our documentary also has less random movement as we would like to keep our final documentary less shaky. Aside from camera shots, the actor needs to be provided with an item of rather dark-themed clothing to match the mystery of the documentary and use another general convention We conformed a lot of general conventions to show how much it has impacted Bagus. The lighting for his sad scenes is made darker while in a scene where he looks happy made it lighter to show the audience the difference of atmosphere. We also use a split screen at the beginning of the opening to show the interviewees who appear to be Bagus’ close friends. The split screen helps the audience to compare and contrast how both interviewees with different backgrounds dress and talk. We also did research for a total of 20 crime documentary openings to gain knowledge on what the opening should look like and how to build suspense and curiosity from only the opening scene. 

Sound/Music Decision

This is our decision to choose the music.

As for the music I chose, I based of mainly on YouTube. However, before I started finding the music I asked our teacher if I was allowed to use copyrighted music or not. Since most of YouTube's music is copyrighted

To start, I optimized youtube's search engine by typing "suspense music background". This was the link to the playlist I found.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyiH5bnBV4URC5DpBmofjOfdGQ0Af_WL2&si=_u2tFxfDP4qoBtlo

Though the one I chose was :

https://youtu.be/NWaNW-aYhVY?si=Es38DtAhAHCDvn5q

The build-up of suspense in the music I think was a perfect match for our plot. Since we started off with a not-so-suspenseful atmosphere we didn't want to hit the audience with an instant boom for music as it would become boring and too monotone. As the music crescendo the suspense increases, I think this slow build-up gives the documentary more energy to it, it builds anticipation and creates an ominous atmosphere.  As the documentary opening reaches the end, the plot becomes darker and becomes more serious,  synchronized with the music, which I think will successfully build the suspense I and my group want to create. 

The beginning doesn't need to be suspenseful because we wanted to create a memorial/dramatic moment as the interviewee describes their moments with Bagus. Therefore I asked my teammates their opinions on multiple songs and we all agreed on this background music. The slow rhythm of the music allows the audience to breathe and connect with the interviewees. The music also uses instrumental music such as a piano that evokes a sense of calm. 

Self Reflection:

This part of the project was done by my teammate Bagas using all 4 of our opinions. The sound of a documentary movie plays a big part in setting the atmosphere and encoding a meaning for the audience. This research made us realise how important it is to choose the right music that could be used as finishing touches to our documentary. Next time, it would be better to ask the teacher for a lot more feedback as the opinion is much more professional. Other than that we could do some more research to get the sounds that we can input for inside of our documentary project. 

Thumbnail research and development

 This post will have our thumbnail drafts (By Bagas and Me) and the research ( made by Bagus )for our documentary.

RESEARCH

Typical general conventions of documentary thumbnails

Mise En Scene

• They typically have a darker vibe, with shades of red and black which correlate to negativity, in this case, the colour red correlates to blood, which humans bleed when they get hurt or murdered. While black correlates to general negativity, this is done usually for the backdrop of the thumbnail, and the background and base colours of the thumbnail. 
  
• They either used an establishing shot of the crime location as the picture of the thumbnail, this is used to further add suspense and gives the movie a chance to hook the reader on so they will be wondering if that location actually relates to the real crime or is it really where the crime happened, which makes them watch the whole movie. 
  
• Most of the time, documentaries use a picture of the victim/perpetrator to give a direct hint to the viewer who was involved. Still relating to the topic of colour, documentaries usually colour grade their faces to be black, or dark. To correlate to the aspect of crime and its negativity. 

Camera Angle

The common camera shots used in the thumbnails would be

• Close-ups, often used to close up the characters for the viewers to focus on the main subject (usually the culprit or the victim), can often use the main facial expressions of each character that is involved to set the vibe and tone, 
  
• Establishing shots to give a sense of setting.

Edit

• Split screen images to directly associate the victim and culprit.

#1 What Jennifer did. 

Mis En Scene

• A happy picture of Jennifer on the left side, this is to show her persona, her happy self that she portrays outside. The expression also brings a good vibe to her name in this case. Here, she looks neat and she has a proper makeup. Which shows her positive side
  
• In contrast, a bad/ugly mugshot of Jennifer was used, this implies that she also has a bad side, her hair all scruffy, her face unhappy and unseat, all contributing to the suggestion that this is her other side. A bad side
  
• A red filter was used on her bad side to enhance the aspect of negativity on her bad side. This also enables the viewer to somewhat guess what happened, as the colour red connotes blood, murder, and death. In this scene, death happened, murder happened, and blood happened.

Camera Angles

• On both sides, a closeup is used to shift the viewers' focus on the expression of each picture. This will help viewers get the vibe of the thumbnail. And it can let the guess and hook into the documentary to catch on what actually happened. In this case, the close-ups helped zoom in on the positive smile of Jennifer (Her Persona) and the mugshot (the reality)

Edit

• The split screen is used to create the impression of persona and reality, this helps to make the viewers know that there are two sides to the story, that not all smiles are genuine and pure, and some, “angels” could be devils. 

#2 American Murder: The Family Next Door

There are multiple versions of the thumbnails, but I will analyze each based on their similarities.

Mise En Scene (First Thumbnail)

• For the first thumbnail, they intend to be vague in the production of their thumbnail, as they use an EKG machine reading that shapes into a house in the end, with red colours, firstly, this EKG scale is used to show what was once life, turned into a mystery, the houses are used to symbolize the crime happened in some couple of houses. The colour red connotes death and blood, which will give the viewer a clue that death is involved, this also builds up mystery and suspense as viewers are left to solve the mystery, by watching the movie. 
  
• Semi-bolded words are used in this thumbnail to give the sense of strictness, stiffness, and mystery to the viewer.

Camera angles

• The only specific shot is a close-up shot, which focuses on the key mystery making of the movie through the thumbnail.

Edit

• There are no specific edits in this thumbnail extract. 

Mis En Scene (Second Thumbnail)

• For the second thumbnail, the thumbnail producers decided to use the blurred-out picture of the convicted killer, Chris Watts, this conforms to the typical conventions of crime documentary thumbnails as they use the killers’ picture in their thumbnail. This is to give a direct clue to the viewers to keep them guessing and asking the question, “Is it this guy in the thumbnail who did it”, this also creates a sense of suspense and mystery. 
  
• The use of red. Bold fonts are also used, this also conveys the typical conventions of crime documentaries, the red color of the font connotes again, murder and blood again, and the boldness makes the scene more serious. 
  
• In conclusion, Chris Watts direct clue of Chris Watts being the murderer.

Edit

• There are no specific edits in this thumbnail extract. 

#3 Ice Cold: Murder, Coffee, and Jessica Wongso

Mis En Scene

• This thumbnail somewhat conforms to the typical genre conventions of crime documentaries, as it uses the picture of the alleged perpetrator (Jessica Wongso), again, this is to give the viewer a sense of interest and a direct hint, “What is the correlation of this woman and the case’ (suspense, mystery, questioning)
  
• There were cropped shots of newspapers and article headlines. This gives the reader the idea that this case was famous, and they can’t miss out on this documentary and they have to watch it. 

Camera

• In the snippets of these newspapers, there are various close-ups of the articles in the edit. This shows a sneak peek of the newspapers with the words visible and readable, from here, the audience can get a clue of who was involved, with small details of the story being spilled out which hyped them up, they felt that it was appropriate to be watched. 

Edit

• They used split screens to get the subject in one room with the newspapers at that time. 

#4 Worst Roommate Ever, 2022

    

Mis En Scene

• This thumbnail really conforms to a crime documentary as they use a presumably messy man with untidy brows sneaking through a door and peeking. The act of peeking is usually connoted with stalking, being a creep, and basically invading privacy.
  
• The kind of beat-up wooden door suggests that this may be set in an old setting or old house, or that this is a horror house, but it seems not. 
  
• Thorough words, they bolded white to make it way more serious and direct to the reader and it can make them ask the question, “Why is he/she the worst roommate?”What did she do? This really helps bring suspense to life with just a picture

Camera Angle

• They use an extremely close-up shot, hiding the rest of the face and body, firstly, this scares the viewer as you don’t see an eye peeking at you every day as a thumbnail. This can give them a negative/positive feeling in the cinema. Which creates a new trend and keeps them attached. 
  
• Secondly, the hiding of the face and other parts of the body may connote the fact of hiding something and not being honest. 

Edit

• There are no credible edits worth giving effect. 

#5 Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel

Mise En Scene

• The bell has an extremely spooky shadowy figure in the middle, this creates a feeling of unease which conforms to the typically dark and mysterious genre conventions of crime documentaries. This figure also will get the viewers questioning, “Does this figure have something to do with the disappearance? Is she the one who disappeared? These questions can make them hook on to the documentary searching for the outcome
  
  
• In the background, the blurred "Do Not Cross" police tape and flashing lights connote and suggest danger, crime, and urgency. This layer makes the crime scene aspect more tangible and can spark a good amount of curiosity about what exactly went wrong at the hotel. And as usual, the presence of police conforms to the genre stereotype of crime documentaries.

Camera angle

• The low angle and closeup make the bell seem strong, this basically says that this bell has a massive role and presence in this documentary, symbolizing the importance of the hotel in question as bells=hotel lobby. It also immerses the viewer in the environment.

Edit

• Dark colour grading really conforms to the dark-natured genre stereotype of any crime production. This is to give a sense of negativity and suspicion to the eyes of the viewer, which can make them suspect that something has happened. 
  
• Blurring of the figure in the bell, really adds to the element of suspense as this makes the viewer wonder who this person is blurred in the bell and what is her correlation. 
  
  

DEVELOPMENT

This will be our development for the thumbnail including our improvements and the challenges.

Making the thumbnail was quite challenging as this was our first time creating this type of project. Our research turned out to be quite useful as we used them as guides on how to make a documentary thumbnail with the genre of murder. 

We made a total of 40 drafts for our thumbnail. This is too much to choose from so we shortlisted and nominated 4 of the most developed thumbnail ideas and the final thumbnail for our documentary. 

1st Draft

We tried to make our thumbnail using inversed colours such as green and red. This is made to show how our actor has 2 sides and implement this meaning to the audience. The inverted colours should also make the audience feel eerie and disturbed as the colours aren't the usual colours that would be used by anyone when making a thumbnail. 

2nd Draft

This time we changed the color for our documentary to make things seem less eerie. We would also like to show how Bagus, our main character is a nonchalant guy who undergoes catalysts making him a different person.  In this documentary, that case will be about shampoos. I don't know how but we will work it out eventually. The colour of the fonts is also similar to how it should look and according to our first draft, the title scene should not be that long and difficult. 

3rd Draft

For our 3rd draft, we just decided to use grey as the inverse of red to show how surprised his friends are. Instead of black, we made the ‘not so’ coloured white as it would be necessary to show that the left side of him is his happy side. The colour white connotes peace and freedom which was what Bagus was, his rejection changed all of his behaviour making him look even more bay. 

4th draft

For this draft we made Bagus’s face half blurred to make it seem more mysterious and imply to the audience that there is something wrong with him. We wanted to make the audience think he isn't his normal self and something in him changed. This is not our final thumbnail as we made some changes to the final one. 

Final Thumbnail

Our research conducted things that we could use for our documentary project and this is the final thumbnail we chose for our project. This thumbnail we believe represents our actor’s negative side and positive side ensuring the meaning we wanted to imply to the audience is more reasonable and makes so much more sense. We decided to not make both pictures side to side but instead made them on opposite sides. 

Self-Reflection: This blog has both the research and the development of our thumbnail. The thumbnail research was made by Bagus and it helped us a lot as we were required to do research to help with making our thumbnail. My role was to help Bagus decide on which thumbnails we should use as our research. Using the genre of the documentary that is linked with ours which is murder and the story inside of each one that is similar to my team's documentary. I also helped with searching the similarities of different thumbnails to see the general convention such as red text, dark lighting, or a close-up shot of the actor that we could definitely use for our own. We also included our thumbnail development which is made by Bagas and I. This development shows our progress when making the thumbnail and improving on every slide. We also changed a couple of things as when we showed the thumbnail draft, we were given feedback on what we should keep and what should not. This change improved our creative skills as we learned how to represent our target audience through only the thumbnail. This makes things easier when finalising our thumbnail due to the dozens of thumbnail development that we made choosing which suits better to potentially reach our targetted audience's attention.  

Editing

This post will be about the progress of how my teammate Bagas edited our documentary. Including the problems, small details, and improvements. 

Pre-Editing

Since the shots we took were using multiple phones, we as a group decided to make a Google Drive to ease up the collection process so that we could review all the clips at once. This also saved my storage space within my phone as it was nearly at its limit, as all of the footage combined was around 6 Gigabytes while my phone was only capable of holding another 2 Gigabytes.  

At the beginning of the week, when this project was introduced, I was confident that I could learn editing software within these months for this project. Davinci Resolve is an editing software that I chose at first.  This was very new to me, usually, I use my mobile phone to quickly edit things but since this is a big project I may want to switch over to using desktop software. However, a huge problem was that I didn’t manage my time well, therefore I didn’t have enough time to really explore and dig deep into the application. Hence, as time was ticking and the deadline got closer I decided to switch over to capcut on my mobile phone. As I do have experience editing using this software. 

Editing process

The first step I did was to lay out all of the clips in the order of the script, person by person. After that, I matched up the audio with the correct clip and synchronized it with their lip movement. This is because we had a mic issue, the issue was not having an external mic, so we decided to use another phone to record the audio. The way I did this was by extracting the audio from the video itself, this is a cool feature I discovered in capcut while editing. Then I added pictures between the conversations, using things such as slideshows or screenshots of Bagus to make it more authentic and realistic. This feature of a crime documentary was also found in my research, the use of real-life evidence. 

Then I added finishing touches such as effects, for example, in the flashback I added a black and white effect that connotes Bagus’s hopelessness after the rejection. Increasing the dramatic effect. Another effect I added was a vignette, this was to increase the focus towards the interviewees. The dark edges create a sense of claustrophobia which makes the audience feel more uneasy. 

As well I added a blur effect towards the ending with a fade in transition as the flower drops, this is to make the audience anticipate why the video was obscured and make them have to watch more to know what happens next. 

Lastly, I added the subtitles for the videos. A reason why I did subtitles last is because If I wanted to adjust the clips, for example moving the audio forwards or backwards I have to push every other clip. This is because, to my knowledge, capcut doesn’t have a feature that allows clips to stick to their audio or effects. Hence it will be a hassle to adjust everything again when it's already in place. Therefore doing subtitles last would be the most efficient way to finish the documentary. 

FEEDBACKS GIVEN:

A feedback we got from our teacher was that during a high-angle shot when Nicho came out, the bed was in the shot making it not suit with the other clips. Therefore a solution we got was adding a split screen feature and cropping the clip so that the bed will not be showing. The other side was then used as a slideshow to show Bagus’s pictures. We as a team decided to keep this change by our teacher as we needed a way to put more pictures in the documentary, and this change helped us add more pictures.

 

Another feedback we got is the diegetic sound of the light turning off during the book's closing scene. My teacher advised us to use the same sound effect for the light switch noise, we realised this was a problem as it made it as if the place was in two settings. In the end, we were satisfied with this change as it now connects with the whole scene. 

Lastly, we got feedback about the ending. My teacher recommended putting a picture or video behind the text in the end, because the background was pure black. By adding the video in the end, even though it was blurred, it helps build the suspenseful mood making the text seem more ominous. Therefore we decided to keep this change.

Self Reflection:

The editing process was done by my teammate Bagas but I played the role of giving feedback, choosing the sound, and which scenes should be included and which should not. Editing plays a big role for a documentary video but choosing the right scenes was more important. We worked as a group to decide which scenes we wanted inside of our video and which weren't as significant. We wanted the audience to decode the meaning of mysteriousness and spike their curiosity by utilizing our knowledge of camera angles and camera shots. We also discussed the order of scenes to make a documentary with a better flow that won't make it boring for the audience. We also gave feedback to Bagas and asked the teacher for feedback which made him make several changes to our first draft. With only 1 guy editing the video, it makes it easier for the rest of us to split our work and finish all the tasks on time. The progress of editing made me learn a few things. I also assisted Bagas with making the subtitles. Making the subtitles alone would take more time as Bagas would have needed to listen to the clip over and over again. Having another form of help to make the subtitles is crucial when completing our documentary project. Although not done by me, editing needs to be precise and careful as a simple mistake would make the whole project fail. We as a team learned how to be more cautious and how to focus more on the small details that have the potential to alter the meaning encoded for the audience to something completely new. 

Behind-The-Scenes

 This post will include our behind-the-scenes and progress while shooting the documentary.  

Self Reflection:

Shooting this project we had to push through several challenges such as lighting problems, a busy schedule, and many other problems. Facing these problems we were required to find solutions if we didn't it wouldn't be possible to finish our video. Listing all the problems we face made me realise how important it is to notice the small details that could change the meaning of a scene/clip. We did change a few things several times, finding the right lighting that could create the meaning we wanted was quite difficult, especially with minimal equipment but we did the best we could and found quick solutions to our problems. Making this compilation it made me realise how much my team and I have grown. For the next time, it would be better to invest more in technological tools such as microphones and cameras. Doing more independent research would also help improve the quality of our documentary as most of the time we had to figure out which camera angle was better for the scene as natural lighting caused us to make more changes.