This blog post features my (Maxi) critical self reflection.
Introduction
The brief for this project was to produce an original documentary TV programme lasting approximately 3 to 5 minutes, together with a thumbnail for display on a streaming site. I decided to do this project in a group, and together decided to make a participatory mockumentary about a group of students who on their first day of school, find that they all share the same name. We chose this style because we feel that it would allow for a more interesting story if the filmmakers were directly connected to the plot, and would lead to funnier moments throughout the documentary. We decided to call the documentary, "Dave(s)".
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
Dave(s) is a mockumentary that is centered around the life of high school students, more specifically in an international school environment. The goal of our mockumentary is to give audiences a laugh through the usage of different stereotypes, or more specifically caricatures, of the different subcultures that can be found in high schools in this modern age/generation. This leads us to having a vast representation of different audience members, as they can likely find people in their lives who they know that act similarly to the people represented in our mockumentary. The personalities of the Daves vary but include a jock, softboy, introvert, a member of the LGBTQ, a character who isn't even called Dave, and a "player"/cool kid. As mentioned previously, we turn the stereotypes of these characters to the extreme and portray them in the most exaggerated way possible. This gives our mockumentary its comedic effect as we hope audiences will laugh at how insane their personalities are. Additionally, we employed many different forms of media language to portray the personalities of our characters. Most notably, the non-diegetic music that we used when each Dave is telling their story. For example, in Muscle Dave's introduction, we use hype and up-beat music as this represents his inflated ego and masculine aura. For Softboy Dave, we decided to use "Bad", by the band "Wave to Earth" as it represents his introverted nature and conforms to the type of music people with a similar personality may listen to. Lastly for Creepy Dave, we decided to use little to no diegetic or non-diegetic audio, to further embody his eerie atmosphere.
We conform to most of the stereotypes that are associated with the aforementioned subcultures of students, for example, how our jock will be a meathead that only thinks about himself, our introvert will be extremely quiet, our softboy character will be interested in all things indie, and be very shy, and our player will think that every girl that sees him loves him. In a sense we are also trying to convey how some of the characters we try to represent, like jock Dave, are obnoxious and provide the audiences with the preferred reading that they do not want to act like this in real life. Overall, we try our best to represent all parts of the high school ecosystem by using an ensemble of characters, and not having one character be in the spotlight at all times. as we want to be as representative as possible to real life, as we want to give the audience a feel that these situations and characters could be people in real life. This according to Uses and Gratification Theory would lead audiences to watch our documentary due to them wanting to find their personal identity. Even though the message of our documentary is to tell audiences to not act like this in real life, it may still help audiences in a sense that they'll recognize their flaws and aim to change the way they act to become better people.
How do your products engage with the audience?
We engage our audience by using the psychographics and demographics associated with our target audience, which in this case we have many. The concept of the mockumentary in general is based around modern Gen-Z meme culture, as we first thought of the idea of having a mockumentary with 6 characters of the same name after one of our members saw a meme on the internet of how 6 people named Josh gathered and fought to see who keeps the name. We then decided to take this idea and base our show about how even though all these people share the same name, they're all very different. Other than that, the documentary also includes many references to popular culture that will engage our target audience of Gen-Z viewers. We do this through using the memes based on people with certain personality types. For example, on social media apps like Twitter and TikTok, there are many users who are labelled as "Gym Bros" that always only talk about the things they're interested in and try to push it to others, which in this case would be going to the gym. Most people find these people incredibly unserious and love making memes of/love making fun of them. Thus, we decided to use these memes and put them into our characters like Muscle Dave. This is an example of Barthes' cultural code, as audiences will need to understand the internet culture of newer generations to be able to get the joke and be able to laugh at the characters' personalities.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
The research we conducted included research on the conventions of documentary openings and mockumentaries in general, the common themes of documentary thumbnails, and research on personality types and traits that people in Gen-Z find funny. From our research on documentary openings and their thumbnails, we found that the best documentary openings for mockumentaries often throw the viewer straight into the environment of the mockumentary without giving a backstory or explanation as to what happens, as well as mainly being shot by using handheld camera work, which we followed as all montages that we shot were shot in this style. Furthermore, we also found how the humor and comedy that is so effective in mockumentaries cannot be explicit. It is not like most forms of comedy where the joke is told out to the audience explicitly, in this case its a subtle build up of events that lead to a comedic punchline that isn't supposed to be funny to the characters in the mockumentary, but is funny for all other audiences watching. Additionally, we realized that most mockumentaries also include satire to add to the mockumentaries overall humor. We followed these conventions accurately and had elements of all of this in our documentary, for example for including satire, we had a character (Player Dave) who believes that he is the object of all women's desires. We then show him failing miserably in his attempts to grab the attention of these women, and thus provide a commentary about how people who see women as objects are very ignorant and shouldn't be taken seriously. This theme of "not judging a book by its cover" is something that we would aim to include throughout this documentary given we were to continue the idea, as we want to show audiences that people are often not who they present themselves to be, and that it may all very well be a façade. Next, for the thumbnail, we saw how most thumbnails of documentaries on platforms like netflix tend to give a brief idea of what the documentary will be about. Thus we follow this convention by providing an image of 6 of our Dave's together, with text above their heads that reads "Dave(s)". The color tone is also quite plane as we don't want our mockumentary to seem too extravagant or outlandish for our target audience, and thus we chose to go with a simpler design.
In Conclusion
All in all, I believe that me and my team have worked effectively in producing the best documentary we possibly could. We planned all our decisions in detail and conducted effective research on each element we added or changed throughout the development process, and overall I feel very satisfied with the final outcome of the work we've done individually and together to produce this final product.
No comments:
Post a Comment