CSR - Doc

This is the Critical Self Reflection for our Documentary Project

For this project, we had to produce a 5 minute documentary about anything we wanted, as well as a social media page and a thumbnail for said documentary

Our idea is to make a mockumentary about a transformation process (sort of a mix between a reality tv show and an observational documentary as we struggle with dealing with this one incel. Incels are stereotypically negatively represented in media, so we try to show that we’re able to change even someone like that. That’s the concept that the documentary has, but in an unserious way that makes it a mockumentary. What started out as a transformational documentary, slowly turned into a fight for our life in this intro as we had dumbed down our main subject to animalistic natures, making him a disease patient instead of your average incel.

How do your products represent social group or issues?

Our products uses the concept of a celibated version of a pandemic/epidemic. We represent the people similar to us / people around us, known as incels who are stereotypically retarded, ugly and smelly. Our representation in this mockumentary conforms to those stereotypes. These stereotypes are normally found on social media videos such as Instagram, TikTok and Youtube, but we are showing it on higher quality platform, being a documentary series. The character Jennifer Cambridge also conforms to a lot of stereotypes on asian parents, being disappointed in their children and having a complex, although exaggerated here, of loving them. We also mimic the stereotypical documentary hosts that tend to get too curious or familiar with their subjects. This is shown in the host character as he gets very close to the subject in such a short span of time, resulting in him facing the consequences of his actions, being chased down by Steven.

How do your products engage with the audience?

Our Products engage with the audience mainly through representation and relatability, Users and Gratification is efficiently applied here as it brings out Personal Identity as well as Social Relations for people who go through similar experiences. The jokes we use are also subtly adult-like, and so we attract a slightly more mature audience as well. The engagement doesn’t really conform to the idea of intellectual engagement, as it is mainly just slapstick comedy on here, however for quite a few of our jokes there is a bit of media literacy needed to understand them. We also follow genre conventions of certain documentaries where they approach wild animals. This is shown in the scene where we approach our patient carefully, as if approaching a wild animal. According to our media teacher, this could be something out of Bear Grylls, which would be a nice reference for the audience to enjoy as they watch the character interact with his surroundings.

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

Through extensive research we came to the conclusion that with the members on our team, we’d do best on a mockumentary, and we took lots of inspiration from Borat for having lots of drops of adult comedy. The mockumentaries that we researched generally are unserious, funny, have the graphics and production of a documentary such as camera work, editing, and concept but do it all in a sort of amateur manner. We conform to this. I went further into research for the filming stage, by watching a thriller movie series called 'Creep'. Through this film I was able to understand a lot more about the different kinds of camera movements and angles that were needed to make a shot look like it belongs in a 'live' sort of documentary. The camera movements in Creep 2 whenever they were in a chase scene especially, gave me lots of inspiration for what we did then in the chase scene at our patient's house.