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.