Critical Reflection

This post is my own personal reflection on our project

For this project, our brief outlines that we have to create a short 3-5 minute long introduction sequence within the crime documentary sub genre. For my group, we went and created a celebrity crime video with the primary audience being younger people who are still in high school who follow celebrities or influencers and also keep up whenever there is drama.

For our documentary we tried to focus on making the rivalry between Resha & Ata more dynamic, not in just a good vs evil way but in a way where each person is given their own merits and demerits. We also tried to focus on making the argument for and against Resha & Ata more ambiguous by having back to back interview clips with people from either side contradicting each other. Two of our portrayals were of freshly popular young artist, we chose to go with some stereotypes for this for example, Resha & Ata are portrayed as having a strong personality, like able although they might be petty or a little arrogant, we also tried to make them relatable and understandable in order to make them seem like a fresh new star who hasn’t risen to be an “untouchable” celebrity who is known world wide like a Hollywood actor. We chose this way of interpreting a newly popular artist as nowadays when people see those kinds of celebrities who are new to fame, it can be easier to like the celebrities as they are often more down to earth and we can understand them as they still control their actions instead of having a manager do all the work regarding their outside appearance. We also chose to portray the friends or old friends of Resha & Ata, for Resha’s friend, Kevin Stuart Bob, we chose to portray a quieter and more stable person who was slightly irritated with Resha in the past, we did this by choosing a guy with a soft voice that doesn’t give him a menacing presence, and making him seem more like a befriendable regular kind guy. On the other hand, for Ata’s friend Abu Rafiking Kong we chose to portray him as a vibrant and emotive man who has strong beliefs, he speaks in a loud and clear voice as he exclaims his opinions and views, we did this to match Ata’s challenge prone personality as somebody who always clearly states their opinions aloud are often people who get into arguments, however in this case, the relationship between the 2 is more like sparring partner than rival. As for Ata, we chose to portray him as being a chill but confrontational guy to conform with the hip hop artist stereotype of being confrontational, dissing people and aggravating them. Then there is the portrayal of the reporter who is based off of stereotypical paparazzi, intrusive, loud, pushing mics to the celebrities face & trying to get their opinion with questions that might tick them off as confrontational or controversial questions often get the biggest reactions. We have used some technical elements to show this, such as the mise-en-scene of the reporter being in places where they probably shouldn’t be, such as Ata’s house or the choice to hold up the microphone to the artist’s face.

We tried to create a production piece which mostly shouldn’t stand out from other crime documentaries and aims to try and blend our product in with those media text types. We tried to do this as we think that branding our text to be a conformity would help audiences know what might be in our video even without watching it, for example if our thumbnail is placed in the netflix crime documentary genre category, we would not stand out as much. That might initially lead to less exposure however it would mean that potential audiences who like regular crime documentaries would know what the contents of our documentary would be like therefore at some point they might come to watch it. However for our thumbnail, it would look relatively more rugged than the actual documentary as we tried to conform with the thumbnail convention of having that dirty look.

As we target younger people, ones who are still in high school, we chose to portray celebrities as in this day and age, many young students are often informed in their social media drama between celebrities having a spat over the internet, we tried to incorporate this into our documentary by having a celebrity spat, specially with young & relatable celebrities who might both resonate with the audience and also cater to their want to see the drama between the 2. Another way we targeted a young audience was the choice to shoot our interviews in a high school classroom which was implied to be where Kevin Stuart Bob & Abu Rafiking Kong associated with their respective friends. We also tried to make the characters more relatable with the help of Blumer & Katz U&G theory personal identity, where it states that audiences watch in order to get some part of their personality expanded, for example, we tried to portray Resha as somewhat sensitive as we believed that most of our audience could be ticked off like that, we also made Ata more grounded and made it seem like he can become chill when he was confronted & ambushed by the reporter in his own house.

Before beginning production of this project, we as a whole group did our own research into the crime documentaries we have seen or sought out on our own to research in order to shape our documentary and give us a general starting point. Firstly, we can understand by the usage of Neale’s Genre Theory that conventions can be seen as what the audience wants to see from the genre, so we tried to mostly conform with the genre instead of trying to create a further sub genre, the conventions we used were second hand footage or photos which were not directly supposed to be used for the documentary such as the old photos of Resha or the paparazzi interviews as second hand footage is very common with documentaries, another way we tried to conform is by the usage of interviews, especially interviews with people who have had direct relationships with the assailants or the victims recorder with the primary goal of being used in this documentary. As for the thumbnail, we tried to conform by having the image of the assailant on one of the side thirds of the thumbnail which is rugged and is mostly dark as this is also a common thumbnail convention for crime documentaries.