Critical Reflection

 This is the Critical Reflection blog for the Documentary project.

Link to blog: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CWxn4KUxj7H7tAuoV7mcV9kNw6PpU5uJmjz87C7OEz8/edit?usp=sharing

We were asked to create a documentary opening relating to crime fiction. We chose the crime of stalking. Our target audience are late teens to young adults (25-30) from Indonesia, though it is not limited for them.

Branding is necessary to inform and commercialize our media text. In our project we created both a crime documentary and a thumbnail (Fig. 1). The prior serves as the main text for audiences, while the latter is made to inform audiences of the documentary’s theme, while enticing them to watch through hermeneutic codes that raise mystery and tension. According to Stuart Hall’s ‘Reception Theory’, audiences interpret meanings differently according to their subjective reading, our documentary conveys the dominant reading of the dangers and effects of stalking and aim to portray it negatively, we do this by portraying the fragility and innocence of the victim ‘Angel’, with the contrasting strength/poise of the stalker, hoping to invoke feelings of guilt and pity. Additionally, maintaining similar features in our thumbnail and video ensures a stable tone and atmosphere for the viewer, hence why both feature pictures of the main victim, and a similar color palette.

Research on crime documentaries familiarized me with the typical conventions of the genre, it allowed us to subvert conventions to seem unique, while following others to be related and recognizable within the genre. Conventions we followed are the inclusion of law enforcement (detective), the victim, various interviews, and the crime being committed, while using discordant music, and CCTV footage, which was done to reinforce realism and credibility of the crime occurring, accompanied with accompanying elements to cause engagement and tension.Those we subverted are the extensive use and portrayal of teenagers in the video, and portraying a male character as the kidnapping victim which challenges both genre traditions and societal views on female vulnerability and fragility, as they are often seen or anticipated as weak or victims, this breaks the typical stereotypes held by society and media, as stated by the Representation Theory. Documentaries like Lover, Killer, Stalker (2024), and Can I Tell You A Secret? (2024), greatly inspired our overall theme, MeS, and genre.

The primary audience for our documentary are late teens to young adults (roughly 16 - 25) which is justified with 2 reasons. Firstly, the central figures of the documentary themselves are teenagers. This creates a sense of relatability, and seeing characters of their own age could invoke feelings of personal relatability as the events depicted within the documentary could very much happen to them, increasing engagement but also emotional weight and value. Secondly, the crime involved in the documentary follows themes of romance and relationships. These themes are often very relatable to younger individuals, who themselves may be navigating interests and difficulties of being in a relationship. These factors align with the “Uses & Gratification” which states viewers consume media to satisfy their personal needs. Our documentary fulfills ‘Diversion’ and ‘Surveillance’ . Our documentary offers entertainment and a form of temporary escape from a viewer's personal lives, but it also offers information and news in a cinematic and dramatic platter regarding a crime that “actually happened”. While also following ‘Personal Identity’ with younger audiences seeing their own age group represented

Our documentary video consists of multiple groups, including law enforcement, teenagers, and stalkers. We represented them in ways to conform to “Reception Theory” where we hope audiences will encode meanings that align with our intended dominant reading. The law enforcement (detective) was portrayed as clean and tidy (Fig. 2) which invoked readings of professionalism and competency, while also including a “girly” keychain and balinese bracelet (Fig. 3), which shows their personal side of life (having a daughter) and shows them as Balinese. The teenage victims and stalker are portrayed in a contrasting manner. The latter is shown as clean, tidy, and in interviews as soft spoken (Fig. 4) which invokes innocence and sympathy from the audience. The stalker on the other hand is portrayed as eerie and mysterious based on their clothing and the lack of their face and identity being included (Fig. 5), while also seen as a ‘creep’ from the voicemail based on their lisp which is often seen as undesirable. We represented issues of stalking, kidnapping and the fact that it occurred in Indonesia. We did this to shine light on crimes that may seem personal and less grand towards the wider audience, while also to emphasize how these crimes are often unreported in Indonesia, in fact, Indonesia does not have a specific criminal code for stalking.