Critical Reflection

 this is my critical reflection my whole media studies project 

CR 1	How do your products represent social groups or issues?
CR 2	How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
CR 3	How do your products engage with the audience?
CR 4	How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?

We as students of media studies were told to create a 5 minute documentary based off crime genre. Me and my group decided to title it Final Bell : Thirteen Seconds, this was about a troubled student who got left out in a group and decided to terrorize her classmate and best friends

Branding helps people expect the things that they are about to see in our documentary video, its important to use branding and for example in our video, our group created two things such as the thumbnail which had most of the important actors who were shown in black and white and face blurred out, this is in fact called a hermeneutic code, this makes an expectation to the audience that something is going to happen to them, since they were portrayed this way Our video really focuses on the dangers of bullying and how such little things such as just simply mocking one another can lead to something big and dangerous, and according to stuart halls reception theory people will perceive media differently based on how they experienced it but in this case we tried to show the dominant reading, showing that bullying can be deadly if it affects the wrong person.

My group and I researched deeply into crime documentaries and most of them have some common conventions or features, for example real footage, police involved, interviews. In our project documentary we decided that we follow those conventions but also subvert the actors. In a normal conforming documentary, they always show the criminals or bad guys as this evil, masculine, no sympathy person. In our documentary we decided to subvert and to make the criminal more of an innocent popular girl who is deeply hurt and troubled. It challenges the usual stereotype of “only men can bomb and terrorize other people” and this shows that the girl are always weak and have no power or control. In our documentary it shows that girls are also capable of this.

Our target audience for our documentary is most definitely teenagers ranging from the age of 15 to 18 plus, teachers preferably high school teachers and parents. We chose this as our target audience because our main focus in our documentary is a group of teenage girls and it is in a school environment which would explain why teachers and students are our target audience, bullying is also a common incident that happens these days among teenagers. Secondly, why we chose parents as a target audience is because the whole message of this documentary was about keeping your children away from toxic environments that involve bullying, so that it won't turn into something worse. 

In our documentary there are mainly teachers and students. The victims of the poison gas were shown as friendly, loving and innocent people, they were friends with the suspect and they seemed like a family, very caring towards each other. In this documentary they were portrayed as a happy group of friends which shows the audience that they have a strong bond, However the suspect remains a mystery and only known as the troubled girl. The teachers that were interviewed was shown at a professional manner but Ms Vina which is one of the teachers that was close to the suspect was shown as a more emotional more open character showing empathy for the victims and confusion towards the suspect, because Ms Vina always thought that the suspect is a sweet loving girl and that she would never do that. This makes the audience feel empathy for the teacher and the victims that were involved but also feel skeptical towards who was to blame for the cause of the incident.