Critical Reflection

 This is my critical reflection for my crime documentary project.

Branding is a way media organizations differentiate themselves from competitors. Each organizations' branding is like a sort of identity that seperates them from others and it's a way for audiences to remember them by. Audiences will be able to recognize different organizations by their style and characteristics that are implemented in their products (by the way movies are directed, the different editing styles, plots, and even typographies seperate one organization from another). With multiple media organizations creating different identities and brands, this gives the audience a wide variety to choose from, and more things people can like.

When making a crime documentary, my group and I followed the genre conventions of a typical crime documentary. A few genre conventions of crime documentaries include close up or medium shots of victims during interviews, and random camera movements during some scenes to create a sense of realism to the audience. The mise en scen included could be actual crime scene footages, a recreation of the crime or event that went down, and filming the victim in the crime scene (revisitng the site post-events). Minimal background noise and creepy eerie music are used in crime documentaries, along with quick cuts between perpetrator and victim, childhood pictures of the victim or perpetrator shown and the cuts made to slowly get quicker and quicker to increase the pace of the story. For our crime documentary, we conformed to majority of the genre conventions like event recreation, filming the victim in the crime scene after the crime happened, minimal background noises and creepy music, because these are textbook conventions for documentaries. However, we subverted to a few, like making our perpetrator an inncoent sweet young girl, and our victim an older intimidating guy. We want to give our audience a reminder that things are sometimes not the way they seem, and to expect the unexpected. 

When it comes to enganging with the audiences, our primary target audience are teenagers and young adults aged 16-25 who are crime enthusiasts. Our secondary target audience are parents of high school teenagers wanting to learn from kidnappings to keep their children safe, or just people who live in the same area where the crime happened and are curious as to what went down in their neighborhood. We appealed to the target audience by filming interviews with the perpetrator, because this way they can analyze and know the behaviour and habits of a criminal. We also used real photos of the location after the crime went down to create heightened emotions such as uneasiness since they serce as hints of what may be shown later on in the documentary; it could also create a sense of sympathy in the audiences, as the real photos used could prove to them how real the situation was and how horrible things happened to those who didn't deserve it. Our product fulfilled all the uses and gratifications criteria as our crime documentary serves as a diversion (suspenseful scenes gives them a distraction from every lives by providing an intense and interesting story to follow), personal identity, since our victim is a quiet shy guy, it represents the group of men that don't usually open up in fear of getting hated for being seen as "weak" when all they are doing are showing human emotions, social relationships, as our documentary can start bonds between audiences and friends as they discuss the topic of the crime and their different ideas and opinions, and finally surveillance as this documentary raises awarenesses on kidnappings and the interviews and footage of the perpetrator within the documentary can be warning signs people can learn and recognise when it comes to detecting kidnappers and criminals. Our thumbnail attracts our audiences as the font style of the word "Christopher" is written in a bright color that pops out from the rest and is handwritten from the perpetrator herself, whilst everything else is set for a serious mood, the little heart for the i may lthe audiences with assumptions that the crime is related to love in which the audiences may decide to watch to check out what actually happened out of curiousity. Blurring the faces of the people in the background except for the man in the middle catches the audiences' attention as they will begin to question why only this one man is unblurred and what is his significance to the story.

The social groups in our documentary are teenages, students, and people of all genders. The preferred reading on them are anti-social students being shown as the victim, proving that they aren't always the perpetrator, and popular, friendly girls are secretly deranged. They are shown by having the anti-social character in hoodies and long pants covering their entire body, and the popular girls in light coloured clothings that pop out and feminine make up and hairstyle. The issues that are included in our documentary include kidnapping and stalking, the preferred reading about tehm are that the stalking and kidnappings are the perpretrator's out of control actions, revealing their obsessive personality and how dangerous it is towards the victim both mentally and physically. It is protrayed by scenes that depicted kidnapping or stalking shot in dark lighting and either had no music to create suspense and/pr eerie music to create a sense of fear within the audience. The scenes also cut to real life photos of the location of the crime after it happened, solidifying the preferred reading about them as there are real life proof being shown. Our documentary uses stereotypes, however we chose to subvert them instead. The sterotype that seniors in high school are bigger and stronger, and that juniors are inferior, weak, and often intimidated by them, to add to that, girls are usually the victim, and quiet people are usually the mysterious perpretrators. We subverted the stereotypes and instead made the popular girl act as the perpetrator and the victim being an antisocial guy. This would make our crime documentary stand out from the others that conforms to the stereotypes and spread awareness about the possibilites of this happened. It shows the audience that anything could happen and to expect the unexpected.