Final Advanced Portfolio Critical Reflection

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

 

This A2 coursework documentary is called ‘Abandoned, Living with Lymphoma during Covid’, my research informed me of this topic as I never looked into non-Hodgkin lymphoma before, so it gave me more insight and more information for me to being able to ask questions and what to put on my social media page. Stereotypes are very big and especially about the older generation, these stereotypes talk about how being older is a weakness and how they are vulnerable, I used this for the audience to empathise with the older generation to start with. By using some of Robert Flaherty’s work to manipulate situations when he was filming. I was inspired by ‘Battleship Potemkin’ by Sergei Eisenstein in 1925 as he uses montages in his sequences, using montages I showed the effect that the Coronavirus Pandemic had on cancer patients, it shows the tempo of the documentary by using montages and creates more emotion which is exactly what I want my documentary to portray. As well as researching traditional documentaries I also looked at BBC One documentaries like, “Strictly Amy: Crohn’s and Me”, this goes through someone’s life and tried to follow the interviews that BBC One did in this, this documentary uses my secondary target audience, so I thought it was still useful to add in. I also watched the Netflix documentary ‘Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich’ for the interview purpose as the interviews in this documentary gave so much emotion on how they feel and what they went through.

How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?

 

Abandoned is the name of this documentary, this title comes up in all three of my products to show how families dealt with the lockdown when a family member was vulnerable, my documentary will broadcast on BBC One, this is a very mainstream broadcaster so people that read Time magazine and have Facebook are more likely to watch this documentary due to their age demographic. The purpose of this documentary is to show the struggles but also how they overcome them and show empathy for cancer patients and question whether the NHS did the right thing. The magazine article for Time magazine, the readers of this magazine are also my target audience as it is people who want or need to stay up to date with current events, have career experiences that have led them to promotions in the past, and are generally well-educated. This also promotes the documentary by having an interview with the documentary maker in the article itself, the magazine has the same target audience that my documentary has and offering the audience the Uses and Gratification of personal identity with people that are their own age. My social media posts do not have the same colour palette as each post relates to something different in my documentary and helping the audience sympathise with the interviewees by having emotional shots. To promote the documentary on Facebook I raise awareness of Lymphoma and the documentary will be released on Lymphoma awareness day and I put on an image of the lime green ribbon to emotionally draw in the audience. My branding of all three products shows the content how people were struggling in society during the lockdowns and how they have overcome it.

How do your products engage with the audience?

My aim of this documentary is to give insight into cancer patients and how they lived through covid with this disease, it is also to educate the younger and older generation of people to show what other people were doing during the lockdown. My audience for this documentary is ABC1’s and 2’s with only a little bit more of a female skew. My primary target audience will be 34-50, and people that engage with the news and politics and have something to say about it and how this might be relevant in some people’s lives, this is done through he uses and gratifications theory by Blumner and Katz. My secondary audience would be the younger generation aiming it at 18–25-year-olds, as my topic is quite a mature topic the younger generation might be less interested than the older generation but might still like to learn about what other people have to go through in covid times as well. This would be a completely new topic for them so they would decode this documentary, and this is how they educate themselves; this was proposed by Stuart Hall reception theory. The different aspects of my documentary are aimed at all different ages as there are colourful scenes one minute then bland colours the next, this is to keep the audience intrigued about where my documentary is heading.

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

 

My documentary is about the cancer called Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and how cancer patients got pushed aside during the covid pandemic, due to these representations are very important in my documentary. This documentary is questioning the governments and the NHS’s decisions on whether covid patients should have been first in the cue over cancer patients, 1 in 16 people had Covid during the height of the pandemic while 1 in 2 people have cancer but they might not know. My documentary is neither ‘male skew’ or ‘female skew’, as neither gender has a better understanding of this topic, even though I do use females in my documentary I am putting it on BBC One which is a generalised channel as it is mainstream so targets all genders. I filmed my interviewees in their home environments as it is to do with the Covid pandemic, so this scene is representing that. My social media represents all ages of my target audience, it does lean more towards the older generation as it is on Facebook, but I use a variety of colours to suit all different groups that could see my social media page. I represent all different ages in my documentary through interviewees and the voiceover but also through visual representations. I have mid shots in my documentary alongside my interviews to represent the loneliness that lockdown brought upon people and what they did during the pandemic which people can relate to.