This is our critical self-reflection regarding the overall project - Gio, Carrick, Kaka and Jaden.
1. How do your products represent social groups or issues?
For our A-Level Media Studies Crime Documentary project, we have produced a political crime documentary entitled The Newman's Plot, which focuses on an attempted assassination at a political rally. Our documentary is oriented towards the repercussions and impact of political violence, particularly within small communities. This group consisted of four students, all of whom had crucial roles in the production, contributing to different areas: directing, filming, scriptwriting, and editing. My particular role was that of directing and editing to ensure the story was in line with the research we conducted, focusing on the main ideas of political violence and social consequences.
Our documentary represents two major social groups: the political figures and the everyday citizen attending a political rally. The dominant group would be the White Australians, at least those that are part of or are affected by the politicians, reflective of the demographic where this event takes place. We managed to represent these groups through technical elements such as interviews, re-enactments, and use of real footage reflecting tension and vulnerability towards or surrounding political figures.
This film focuses on addressing political violence at the level of an attempted assassination of a politician in a rally. As we represent this event, it shows how such political violence disrupted not only the safety of leaders but also affected the lives of ordinary citizens who joined this public gathering. We employed Hall's reception theory to give meaning to an audience in a manner that decodes the gravity and danger within daily political situations. The preferred reading stood here for the fact that political violence not only affects its victims but sends shockwaves through an entire community.
We avoided not only criminal but also political stereotypes by descriptive narration of the case and providing the politician in the form of a civil officer, not as some superhuman, which emphasized the human component of this story.
2. How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
Branding played a significant role in making our documentary coherent and visually recognizable across different media platforms. Our branding was heavily influenced by Altman's genre theory, especially regarding the conventions of the crime documentary genre. The dark tones with high contrast that were consistent throughout the documentary were mirrored across all our social media and promotional platforms. This produced a continuative visual style fitting for the seriousness of the topic.
We also branded ourselves through the making of these dramatic soundscapes, hence adding tension to the important scenes. The use of suspenseful music in both the documentary and teaser clips keeps the atmosphere coherent for the audiences to create an associate mood with our production.
Target audience for this product was middle-aged to senior males between 35-65 years of age from Australia and New Zealand. Secondary audiences included young adults between the age bracket of 18-34, in particular, those with interests in political and true-crime journalism. Secondary audiences were reached out to through teaser promotions on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
3. How do your products engage with the audience?
Our documentary satisfies a number of audience needs in light of Blumler and Katz's Uses and Gratifications theory: for diversion, by providing an exciting story of the attempt at assassination, drawing the audience into the tense world of crime involved in political circles; for surveillance, when trying to understand the dangerous situations a political figure finds themselves in and how such political violence permeates the general public. Their personal identity as politically active viewers was also engaged since they could relate to the political setting and probably have been in similar rally environments.
The design of the thumbnail, with a stressed statue full of guilt and the blurred political figure at the back, was a hermeneutic code to invite people to watch and find out why this attack occurred; thus serving as a call to action.
4. How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
Our political documentaries, such as The Assassination of Gianni Versace and JFK: The Smoking Gun, led us to believe we would be able to take on board the traditional conventions of the genre in our use of expert interviews and re-enactments of the moments that were pivotal. Altman's genre theory suggests that if you stickto the blueprint of successful genre conventions, you will inherently meet the audience expectations. This, in our case, would be adding in the familiar components: expert interviews and scene re-creations.
At the same time, however, we challenged conventions since our film fixates not on some sort of grand assassination attempt on a globally recognized figure but on a small-town political event. This subverted expectations: one does not have to have a high-profile incident in order for the subject of a political crime documentary to be produced. What we wanted to show now was how political violence could occur at any moment, including within a small community.
Our research also underlined the role of sound in building tension. During main moments, non-diegetic sounds, such as heartbeats and rising music, could be heard to enhance suspense. This decision was brought about by feedback from our teacher and based on research, suggesting that more auditory tension would raise engagement.
As a director, I'm in charge of making sure that there is narrative flow and the documentary continuously tells one cohesive story. This meant directing re-enactments and working closely with our cinematographer to capture those essential shots that show tension and reality. The pivotal moments I directed were capturing the re-enactment of the rally when we captured the crowd's exuberance and the sudden terror of the assassination attempt.
Our team had to work in collaboration; we divided the roles accordingly: Carrick wrote the script and narrated it, kept the tone according to the genre, that is, a crime documentary. The other members of my team developed the visual and audio aspects of the documentary by doing the cinematography and editing. Throughout this production, we constantly gained feedback from our peers and our teacher. One of the most important feedbacks that we got was about our early drafts-they were missing the visual tension. To this, we added more dramatic lighting and increased the number of close-up shots, especially during moments of highest importance. In actual sense, such a change heightened the intensity of the documentary and made it more captivating.
Overall, the strategies we employed, including branding for consistency, suspenseful soundscapes, and defying genre conventions with a political community of a smaller scale, worked in achieving the desired outcome. We managed to show just how dangerous political violence is in the documentary while still engaging our target audience. We were able to reflect critically on our process and incorporate some meaningful edits from our research feedback that developed our final product.
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