Final Documentary + Thumbnail

 Here is our final documentary introduction video + thumbnail. 

FINAL CRIME DOCUMENTARY OPENING

Here is a link to our Google Drive in case there is an issue with the video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EDZ4-G2wWtWxOSBAO0QdT6KticQJI22D/view?usp=sharing 

FINAL THUMBNAIL

Here is the Netflix mockup of our thumbnail:

Critical Reflection

Here is my critical reflection essay for my crime documentary project. This whole blog post is written by me (Chelsea). 

Here are the questions that needs to be answered for the critical reflection:
Q1 - How do your products represent social groups or issues?

Q2 - How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of 'branding'? 

Q3 - How do your products engage with the audience? 

Q4 - How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions? 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My group were asked to create an opening from an original crime documentary TV programme, lasting approximately 3-5 minutes. We decided to create a murder-crime documentary named, "Me, Her, & Him", which is targeted towards South-East Asians teenagers to young adults above 17 years old. This documentary tells about the murder of a teenage girl who is about to enter a new beginning of getting into a university with her best friend, however involved in online dating which led to her uncanny death. 

Branding is a crucial step to strengthen the public's perception and to increase awareness. In this project, we have made a crime documentary video and a thumbnail. It is important for us to ensure that the brand values and messages are reflected in the main theme of our crime documentary. According to Stuart Hall’s reception theory, the audience plays an active role in how they interpret, respond and decode messages. Hence, our dominant reading is to be careful with toxic friendships or over-possessive ones, as it can end up fatal if not resolved. We show this by the use of technical elements of hand-held cameras to bring a sense of nostalgia and how real their friendship is through the camera. By using the same colour scheme, fonts, tone, and style across our thumbnail and the whole video, we further improve recognition and encourage viewer familiarity and interaction. We also wanted to include screen recordings of phone calls and video calls that we want to incorporate for our thumbnail. Additionally, glitch effects were used to bring attention to issues with the usage of technology. Audiences now can easily identify what sets our product apart from other similar crime documentaries.

Conducting research regarding several crime documentaries allows me to understand the conventions of this genre. We follow these conventions in that a slow to fast paced is thought to establish the atmosphere and tone while also giving a preview of what can happen next. Our crime documentary began with a relaxed tempo, aided by lengthy voice-over narration and extended, still shots, as well as a melancholy soundtrack. As it develops, the tension progressively increases with increasingly frequent rapid cuts and an unsettling, more suspenseful soundtrack. Additionally, we used CCTV footage to depict Clara, the primary character, being questioned and interviewed about how she felt about Sasha. But we subvert the convention of revealing the guilty at the conclusion of the crime documentary's opening. The use of direct mode of address when Clara finally turned to face the camera grabs viewers' attention and cultivates a sense of intimidation and connection. We kept the audience engaged by keeping the killer's true motivations hidden from the beginning, and we did this by using hermeneutic codes from Barthes' Five Narrative Codes. This makes the reader curious about how the story will turn out in the future and generates a sense of mystery. Since we want the audience to be completely engaged throughout the entire viewing experience, disclosing the culprit right away will cause them to lose interest. We also added several easter eggs for the audience to keep guessing, such that for example the number “4” that is used in Sasha’s Instagram account name in Chinese are associated with death, this foreshadows her own death. Clara's Instagram account name “it’s me” suggests that she’s the culprit this whole time.

Our crime documentary's primary focus is on how South East Asians, typically Chinese Indonesians, are portrayed. Public opinion and societal views about social groupings can be influenced by how those groups are portrayed in the media. Racial bias would result from South-East Asians' traditional underrepresentation in this situation. The media frequently features white protagonist leads as the minority group rather than South-East Asians, and they frequently represent ethnic minorities in stereotypical roles that have a major effect on how the general public understands and perceives these groups. The absence of diversity in South-East Asian media is often accepted as normal. In other instances, tokenism, which holds that a strong minority protagonist should be normalised rather than tolerating a stereotypical side character as a sign of diversity. The portrayal of a limited number of marginalised people in a way that implies their inclusion is reflective of true diversity, while in fact it is not, forms this dishonest representation. People must be fairly and accurately represented, free from harming stereotypes and with the only goal of increasing views from the audience. Therefore, in this crime documentary, we have considered the roles and portrayal of marginalised individuals by using leads that are fully South-East Asians to avoid creating a one-dimensional view and to develop fully-realised and complex characters. The three main characters in our documentary, Sasha, Clara, and Kyler, are all complex individuals who cannot be described in simple terms. For example, while Kyler was suspicious from the beginning but was unaware of his intentions, Clara did have an evil motive at the end. Considering that our main target audience is also South-East Asians, this would make them feel seen and affirmed when they see themselves being portrayed in the media, which is linked to the Uses & Gratification theory by Bulmer & Katz of personal identity. Each character is also given a unique personality that we develop, such as Sasha, one of the characters. We wanted to portray Sasha as a kind hearted, soft and gentle person so for her laptop desktop we incorporated pink as the main colour, connoting femininity, sweetness and romance. Folders and sticky notes are also added to show that Sasha is an organised person and always has plans ahead.

Issues such as online dating & toxic or one-sided friendships are also commonly discussed in this modern society, especially for teenagers and young adults. Online dating is enormously popular among teenagers in South-East Asia, making the topic highly relatable and engaging for these groups. Stereotypes of online dating might be seen as unattractive, deceitful and deviant. People often perceive online dating that relates to either safety problems (the possibility of meeting someone dangerous in person who may have evil intentions and pose physical threats) or catfishing (where people represent themselves online leading to deception and dishonesty. Because online dating is portrayed negatively in this crime documentary, Clara has concerns for her best friend. We also included screen recordings of when Sasha is interacting with Kyler, the online boyfriend to show how real and serious their online relationship is. On the other hand, toxic and one-sided friendships are also normalised. Due to their vulnerability and the need for love and affection, people in these kinds of relationships often start out when they are still developing their sense of identity and independence. As a result, they may feel as though they have to give everything they have to another person in order to be loved in return. Furthermore, it develops a dangerous codependency. Initially, our goal was to evoke sympathy for Clara through the use of her voiceover narration, which was an emotional narrative that showed her worries for Sasha. But then, as quick cuts focus on Clara's face, it gradually exposes her true motivations; to be dangerous, controlling, and harmful to others. We also pay attention to the characters' clothing because we want to imply that Sasha is innocent and pure and Clara is evil because of her choice of black clothing.

Editing Process

Here is the editing process of our crime documentary project. This blog post is made by me (Chelsea).

[ First and foremost I would  like to thank my teammates as they also played a huge role in the editing part. They continuously provide me with feedback, comments, and suggestions for improvement for me to improve so that we can achieve the best result for our final project, even though I'm responsible of editing on my laptop. Also, when we were conducting face-to-face meetups, they also tried experimenting with the editing on my laptop which increases their contribution as well. ]

To edit the crime documentary video, I used CapCut that is compatible for Macbook, this is a free editing app for PC designed for beginners (like me) and experienced creators which offers a variety of tools for both basic and advanced editing tasks to create high quality and visually appealing videos. CapCut also has an online version that is meant for novice editors and doesn't require downloads or installations; nevertheless, I got the installed version on purpose in order to edit offline and organise my files better. Below are the process of my editing sequence in this presentation file: 

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•❃°•° Self reflection°•°❃ •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓

At first, we as a  group decided to do the editing collaboratively. Given thatI already have this CapCut application on my laptop for a while, I might as well give it a go for editing. I was curious whether they offer collaborative editing, and they do! Although my group and I were enthusiastic, we are still unsure of how to do so. Hence, I looked up a YouTube tutorial and found this tutorial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r6jHROPZ6E). There was an issue when I attempted to invite one of my teammates. My teammate was able to open the editing file, but all they could see was a black screen because they were unable to access any of the uploaded videos. The fact that the free option only allows one collaborator means that my other teammates were unable to edit as well, which created another problem. Besides that, we once again encountered a problem that simultaneous editing is not possible while in collaborative mode. We initially considered having each person edit a separate scene from all of the scenes, and then compiling them into a single file on my laptop. However, we scraped the idea and let only one person to do the editing and allowed me because the application already existed in the laptop. Editing is a lot of work, especially when I have to explain each modification I made and the progress I've made. Editing took me a long time from start to finish, but fortunately, my teammates are very encouraging and always provide comments, recommendations and comments that make our project better and better each time. Additionally, there have been occasions when our in-person meetings have made it easier for us to discuss and work through ideas quickly rather than me taking a screenshot, sending it to the group, and then waiting for replies, or over the phone in case there are internet issues. Although I am still considered as a beginner, being responsible for editing helped me gain so many technical skills, and watching tutorials also made it easier for me to know what to do. Next time, I must effectively manage my time to avoid rushing things and produce a well-made crime documentary opening.

┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•   ❃°•°❀°•°❃   •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

Thumbnail (Research & Development)

Here is the thumbnail research and development for our crime documentary. This post is written and made by my teammates, Rara, Audrey and Kalista. However I gave input and suggestions regarding the thumbnail development. We all discussed this together as a team. 

Here is the research for crime documentary thumbnails conducted and reported by Rara. 

RESEARCH

Starting off with an overall overview of what crime documentary thumbnails look like on Netflix:

Crime documentary thumbnails stick to several conventions. As it helps show what kind of audiences it's trying to target and is the key to pulling in viewers and letting them know what to expect from the documentary's theme and style. First of all we can see that most thumbnails follow the same convention which is by showcasing the face of the main character most likely the perpetrator or victim in a very close up camera angle (direct mode of address) which helps to imply how their emotions give off a sense of secrecy or intimidation. Most of these thumbnails also have a bold/dramatic typography in bright colours (white, yellow, red) in front of dark backgrounds this ensures that the viewers can easily read the text and help convey the message that the word that is emphasised is the main subject of the documentary. Most thumbnails also use a very dark colour palette with shades of grey, black, red, deep blue in order to convey mystery, danger and seriousness.

Here are two examples that mostly peaked our interest:

Here are 2 documentaries in which the thumbnail really intrigued us which is "ice cold" and "what jennifer did". These 2 follow the typical convention of a crime documentary thumbnail, however "ice cold" uses a different approach which is by making it look like it came out of a newspaper and how it uses separate pieces to convey that this person's story has become well known in different news outlets and that this documentary will shine light on each person's perspective within her story allowing the viewers to not be deceived by other media outlets as they shine her on a different limelight. We liked how both documentaries have a very stylistic choice in the picture and layout which is what stood out the most for us. However we believe that creating a thumbnail similar to "ice cold" would be quite difficult and time consuming as for "what jennifer did" it wouldn't be possible for us to do as the main story of our documentary is about 2 best friends meaning we want to put 2 people as the main focus not just one.

But here is the thumbnail that we will most likely follow

Typography: The title "ICE COLD" is in big, bold, all-capitals font, a clean sans-serif typeface. White text on a dark background helps significantly in readability and gives that stark, cold feeling that agrees with the theme of the documentary. The subtitle "Murder, Coffee, and Jessica Wongso" follows in smaller font, indicating its the subheading from the main title. Typography that feels razor-sharp and stark brings out how dead serious this subject matter is.

Colour palette: Its palette is mainly shades of black, white, and gray to give that cold and sombre atmosphere. The grayscale brings in the documentary and archival feeling; it is as if we are looking at memories of the past. The blood splatters in red create a striking contrast and forthwith direct one's attention to the aspect of violence or crime. The red will add a sense of urgency and danger to the whole composition, which goes in tune with the murder theme.

Lighting and Mood: The general lighting is subduing, moody, and grainy, adding to the dark forbidding tones of the documentary. In addition to the muted lighting, the use of black-and-white photography may suggest a nostalgic, reflective feel; however, blood splatters thrown into this otherwise subdued palette introduce an element of disturbance, an indication that something truly nefarious lies beneath. Choices in lighting and mood create tension on the events thats about to unravel .

Imagery: The most prominent part of the thumbnail would be the two girls with layered photographs of them. The usage of photography would depict personal memories of  when the two best friends were happy together, which would add emotional contrast to the darker elements in the thumbnail. Casual and carefree expressions in the photos, contrast with the violent connotation of blood splatter, which may indicate a tragic twist in their story. It is this conjunction of violence and innocence that stirs any viewer's mind to want to know the background information for the documentary.

This is another version of the "ice cold" documentary thumbnail. We as a team will mostly try to make this kind of thumbnail because it aligns with the main plot we're going for which is 2 best friends and an online boyfriend. So by showcasing pictures of the 2 best friends together it gives off the impression that they're very close but the audience will question if they're that close what could possibly go wrong.

This thumbnail however gave us the idea of making a more digitised documentary as there aren't many that do this convention. So we mostly took ideas such as the typography and the effects from this movie.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DEVELOPMENT

First we tried out different typographies trying to find which style fit best

However after trying all these different fonts Chelsea gave us the idea to use a font that mimicked your iphones chat (from a movie called “missing” look at the research above). As we wanted to follow the theme of a more digitised documentary. However this idea of having a more modern/digitised realistic typography was made after we had several drafts of the first few drafts of thumbnails.

3 Finalised typography

We liked how most were easy to read and how it matched up with our iphone chats, but whats bugged us the most was how the ‘&” on the first and second examples were very off and looked too artistic.

Here is the development of the thumbnail written by Audrey.

Here is the first version and first attempt of the thumbnail design. Rara and Kalista had developed this idea which would be the original template of our thumbnail.

Here, we tried to replicate polaroid pictures of the leading characters (Sasha and Clara; Victim and Murderer) which would connote nostalgia and intimacy. 

The use of polaroid pictures evokes vintage vibes which is a popular aesthetic, or recurring theme in modern media texts, young adults are fond of. This will allow us to attract the targeted audience which would be young adults starting from the age of 17. The polaroid pictures also symbolises treasured memories from their friendship implying a strong bond between best friends, building an emotional connection between the audiences as it evokes their sympathy. Moreover, audiences would be more intrigued to click on our show as they might wonder what could possibly have gone wrong between the characters. Their curiosity for the juxtaposition between the warmth of friendship for a crime documentary genre as it connects to a darker message, would create a palpable tension as it creates an unsettling atmosphere. 

Although, our biggest concern here is that it does not look real which subverts the whole point of the subgenre of true-crime in documentaries inhibiting authenticity implied in our narratives. It is important to show realism as it is impactful to attract an audience, creating an emotional trust which would increase the engagement between them and our documentary. From this, to further ensure that the thumbnail connects to our documentary and is in one theme with it, we decided to explore and experiment further to create more versions and options for our thumbnail.

Here is another version created by me (Audrey).

By doing so, this would make it seem like a real, professionally-made documentary which is why I had decided to include this Netflix logo for the final design later on.

Regardless, I had tried developing a few more variations from this design.

For the variations, I had experimented on a typeface which is discussed in the section above, however throughout the process, we hadn't decided  on a fixed typeface for our title. We had developed this blogpost section beforehand. We all really loved this typeface but however our target audience were young adults and our documentary included clips of screen recordings such as calls and social media pages. This would disrupt the constant theme of digitalised media in our documentary and may also not appeal to our target audience as the typeface looks like a typewriter. It connotes nostalgia but this feeling may be evoked for older audiences as typewriters aren't common in this era. However, we kept it just to experiment before deciding on a fixed typeface.

This first variation would follow the theme of the documentary as it highlights ‘digital prints’ of the two leads. I imputed a glitched effect which connotes uncertainty and unsettling mood as it highlights malfunction and disruption which the audience may decode that there is something going on negatively between the two leads.

For this case, the overall comments on implications within the connotations were the same as the typewriter typeface. Our documentary presented a more modern era (digital) of mass media which means that this ‘ripped paper’ effect isn’t really going to stand out to audiences who are most commonly associated with technologies in this era. This was also a trial which explains why the effects aren’t properly organised to fit into.

This was a more simple approach that I did within the variations. I personally enjoyed this but it seems that something was missing, and I couldn’t identify what. My teammates also weren't interested in this design so we decided to discard the idea.

We came up with a couple more ideas

The red backdrop was a default setting as I only focused on developing the main elements. This was inspired by the picture below that was suggested by Chelsea.

Here is another variation to the layout design. I had input the title to view how the thumbnail would look as a whole. I discarded the glitch effect on the background because I thought it was a bit too much for the audience which would prevent them from clicking as it may look unappealing and unprofessional. I added a shadow which may possibly connotes something darker within which may create suspense.

This was a creative idea to showcase the whole digital media theme that we had incorporated in our documentary. There were also several documentary thumbnails that used this element, a desktop or layout from computers/PC. However, it just does not look real overall and the platform that we used is also limited so we discarded this design as well.

Rara made this design and we were quite fond of the black and white theme but however it does not represent our documentary accurately as the colour grading here isn’t used throughout. This would not make a clear connection between the thumbnail and the documentary itself.

Here is another layout for the thumbnail that I had developed from the photobooth tab layout.

This idea was overall our favourite as everyone in our team likes how our 2 main characters were put together showcasing their bond. And we wanted to have our thumbnail to fit our main theme of our documentary (digital media/online) which is why the picture was shown in Macbook’s photobooth tab. The shadows added gave the same connotations from our experiment before.

Developing from the idea before, I inserted the pictures and divided them into different tabs. This was an idea we got inspired from a documentary on Netflix. The different pieces of each cat connotes that each of the cats side have its own perspective, so with this we want our audience to know that our 2 main characters have its own perspectives that clash with one another even though they are so called ‘best friends’ we want to build an image that there's something else going on in their friendship. Hence why we believe this element fits best not only for our plot but for our overall theme as again our documentary is focusing on a digitised approach.

Here is a variation of layout derived from the photobooth tab previously. This approach was designed and written by Rara and Audrey.

Step 1

It still gave a sense of suspense with the black background (connotes: mystery, death and evil) I also changed the glitch effect to white with a different design. I added a shadow to further emphasise the title to make it stand out but it doesn’t look good.

Step 2 

So initially we didn't have a subheading as you can see from the draft above we added one on the spot because again our whole plot is about a horror that was unveiled through online suspicions and evidence. 

Step 3

Then I asked for feedback for this thumbnail and Chelsea and Audrey said that the word ‘him’ was not noticeable enough. I also tried to move the text lower but then it just seems more out of place. So I tried removing the subheading from the draft but it doesn't give enough context for the audience to know what's the main plot so we decided to use the subheading

Step 4

We then included the subheading but again having the text in a the lower portion side of the thumbnail makes it look more off and not aligned with the rest of the images/elements. 

Step 5

We thought that the shadow was a bit much and that it actually makes the image look weird. Our worry was that the title could not be seen and viewed by the audience which prevented them from being interested to click on our thumbnail and engage further with our documentary. So, we tried to discard the shadow and see the results without it.

Step 6

We figured that it was still off as the audience could not read the title well from the colour. But, to conform to thumbnails of crime documentaries, it’s only acceptable and professional to use monochrome colours, or red. So, we decided to highlight the word ‘him’ to create a confusion to the audience which acts as a hermeneutic code as we don’t reveal the ‘him’ directly in the thumbnail but to falsely and purposely give a hint on the murderer/assailant. This would also keep the audience engaged and may be interested to click on the thumbnail. However, our intentions were discouraged as the red text does not make the word stand out but rather making it more difficult to read which is why we had to change it.

Step 7 

Here we only changed the size of the font in order for it to pop up more and can be easily read by the audience. We also decided to leave the word ‘him’ white because we changed the filter for the back picture so the white text can be more easily visible which solves all the problems we had regarding the thumbnail and leaves us the final design.

Step 8 (FINAL)

This was a last minute decision to change our main heading to bold. Because At first we wanted to use our 7nd step thumbnail but I realised that when you put our thumbnail with other documentaries, you can't see the title because of the thin font and size so we just changed it to be bigger have have a bolder typography. 

This is what our previous draft looked like when inserted it with other documentaries in Netflix

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•❃°•° Self reflection°•°❃ •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓

I have consistently contributed ideas and comments to my teammates thumbnails development, even though they have written the research and development blog post. I discovered that the majority of the crime documentary thumbnails that are displayed on Netflix's main page follows similar conventions, which includes using close-up shots and dark colours to establish the tone and mood of the crime documentary theme itself. I suggested that our thumbnail should have a similar vibe to our crime documentary, because we primarily film it online. In this digital age, I also contributed ideas on how to use a typeface to give the impression that it is a typing font. I also showed them creative references and ideas of the thumbnails that is associated with our theme and we all discussed and communicate which one works the best. Overall, me and my teammates were able to communicate effectively and create a final thumbnail that is suitable based on our preference, and according to our target audience as well as our crime documentary opening itself in order to establish a sense of branding.

┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•   ❃°•°❀°•°❃   •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

Title (Research & Development)

Here is our title research & development. This blog is made by my teammate (Rara), but me and my other teammates discussed together regarding the title that we will use.

Genre: crime documentary 

Sub genre: murder 

Documentary name: 

1. "Digital Deceit: Betrayal in the Click"

2. "Web of Lies: A Friend's Fatal Secret"

3. "The Perfect Match: A Deadly Friendship"

4. "Swipe Right, Murder Left"

5. "Fatal Connections: Trust Turned Deadly"

6. "Best Friend, Worst Nightmare"

7. "Online Obsession: The Dark Side of Love and Loyalty"

8. "Virtual Vows, Real Revenge"

9. "The Double Life: Love, Lies, and Murder"

10. "The Friend Trap: Murder Behind the Screen"

11, Fallacy 

12. Deception

13. Obscura 

14. "Me, Her, & Him" 

I highlighted the words that I believe will be the most catchy for our documentary and we all finally decided on "Me, Her, & Him". As we want it to still appeal to our target audience however add a twist as they wouldn't know who's the killer. CONNOTATIONS: MYSTERY, DECEPTION, CONFLICT, LOVE, DRAMA 

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•❃°•° Self reflection°•°❃ •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓

Having discussions with my teammates regarding that the title we would use for our crime documentary eases our decision making, we do this by listing out different possible titles and then narrowing it. As our story discusses the issues of online dating, we wanted to incorporate words that are associated with so. We considered using the title "Deception" to be our final title for a while, but after realising that it was too general to relate to our topic and that it would give away the entire plot - which is to deceive the audience, we decided to change it. After that, "Me, Her, & Him" was our most suitable idea since it better fits our plot. We were discussing where to put the comma before the final title, which is either "Me, Her, and Him" or "Me, Her and Him." The placement of the commas also affects how the viewers read and so we wanted to place a comma after "Her". Overall, It didn't take long for us to come to an agreement and there were no significant communication issues.

┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━•   ❃°•°❀°•°❃   •━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛