This will be my critical reflection for our documentary project.
Questions to be answered:
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.
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