Critical Reflection

 In the Project Documentary , we are asked to make an opening of a crime documentary with the duration of 3 - 5 minutes. Me and my group decided to make a crime documentary about a stalking case , which also involves kidnapping .  

            Branding is important for media text , so people could recognise the media text that we made. We created our own thumbnail , the purpose of the thumbnail is to make the audience click on our documentary , so we have to make it as engaging as possible. From the thumbnail (fig 1.1)shown audience could know that this is a stalker crime documentary from how there so many picture of an innocent person , which is the victim , also the victim’s face are not shown in every photo in the thumbnail , this is to give hermeneutic code and to make the audience curious . The letter “O” in the word Fixation we change it to a target , to show the audience that she is targeted by someone. The lighting of the thumbnail was shown in dark or low lighting , which creates a meaning that something bad is happening ,and to make the audience know that it is a crime documentary.

Research helped me to know what are the characteristics of crime documentaries and from the research I could know the common convention on the crime documentaries. So this help me to conform the convention so that people could know that our documentary is a crime documentary , and from the research it gives me inspiration on the idea we could use when making the documentary, like the cut used in the edit and what the interview is like and the footage use ,such as the cctv footage , so this could help us to know what to do . The research also helped me to know what subversion we could use in our documentary and the music we could use as crime documentaries mostly use high suspense music , and in crime documentary usually there the police department or detective saying that the case is different from other cases and we follow this convention could be seen in (fig 1.2) 

Our target audience are young adults or teenagers , in the age group of 16 - 25 years old, they are targeted by , first the actors in our documentary are teenagers , so people that are teenagers and young adults could relate to the documentary video we made . So this would make them enjoy watching the documentary , since they are seeing the character have the same age as them. Another way that teenagers and young adults are targeted is from the content of our documentary. Our documentary involves relationships , since young adults mostly relate to romance , relationship . So this might make them interested with our documentary video , also the victims were shown broken hearted which could relate with most young adults this relates to the theory of . We also use different mise en scenes , such as the room of the victim , would relate with most teenagers and the clothing is the clothes used by young adults conventionally or the trend in the young adults clothing. 

                                        

In our documentary, there are more than one social group represented, such as the victim (of stalking) and the victim (of kidnapping) , Detective , and the stalker/kidnapper. We represent the social groups to align with the reception theory , where we want the audience encode meaning same as our dominant reading . The victim is represented as a teenager that is innocent and traumatized with what had happened to her, this is shown from how she acted at the interview, she looks scared and full of anxiety. From the interviews the detectives were shown tidy and professional. It is seen from the clothing and it is shown that he shows sympathy towards the victim. The stalker was shown mysterious and covered with all black clothing , this creates a meaning that he is a bad guy. Also from the voice mail sent by the stalker it already shows how obsessed the stalker is towards the victim , until he desperately wanted to hear the victim's voice and how his jealousy overcame himself , when he knows that the victim have a boyfriend , until he had to commit a bigger crime , which is kidnapping the boyfriend. 

fig 1.1

        

fig 1.2