Final Documentary and Thumbnail

 Here is my final product and thumbnail of my documentary project

Thumbnail

Documentary

Critical Reflection (CR)

 Here is my blog post for my critical reflection

My team and I decided to make a documentary about a school bombing entitled The Final Bell: Thirteen Seconds. This crime documentary explores what really happened behind the "gas" bombing attack, which was unexpectedly caused by a minor suspect.

Our documentary represents teenagers, teachers, and detectives through technical elements that build empathy, trust, and suspense. Teenagers are divided into suspect, victims, and a minor character. The suspect is shown with a blurry editing and happy moments to create mystery. Victims are highlighted through close-ups and zooms to emphasise trauma. The minor character is placed in an isolated setting to reflect loneliness and spark curiosity. Teachers are portrayed with discord music and emotional interviews that evoke sympathy. While detectives are filmed in medium shots to establish seriousness and trust which guides audiences through the case. The documentary also explores issues between the suspect and the school showing the suspect in a way that creates mixed feelings of blame and empathy while the schools reputation evoke trauma and sympathy. By using stereotypes such as CCTV footage, detectives and discord in music, the documentary ads, realism and tangent which encourages audiences to connect emotionally with the event.

Branding means the identity of a product shown through style colour and presentation. This is important because it makes the work recognisable which can build trust and attracts audiences. Our production element works together to build a strong sense of branding through consistent visuals and themes across both the thumbnail and the documentary. In our case, both of the video and thumbnail share a dark theme with handheld evidence style visuals, creating a serious tone and evoking emotions of mystery danger and realism. The use of a striking yellow font in both products, symbolises hazard and toxic warning signs immediately connecting to the bomb theme and grabbing audience's attention. The thumbnail featuring a CCTV footage directly reinforces the documentaries realism while also emphasising it investigate nature making it authentic and eye-catching. Together these elements established a consistent identity that audiences can decode as serious danger and true to life. By combining dark visuals realism and hazard symbolism the branding helps the documentaries stand out while creating a mood of tension and importance which encourages audiences to trust the story and engage with the content.

Our products engaged with the audience by targeting teenagers to young adults (15-25) who are familiar with the school setting and interested in true crimes, plot twist, and analysis. The thumbnail place a major role in attracting this audience as it directly connects to the theme of mystery, shock, and realism. It features a CCTV classroom footage which makes the situation feel raw chaotic and authentic which sparks curiosity about what really happened to the students. The dark colours reinforce the true crime atmosphere while the yellow font pops out to symbolise hazard and danger making the title eye catching. The use of automatic code is also important as the thumbnail hints at "thirteen seconds" leaving audiences with unanswered questions that can only be solved by watching the documentary. This encourage viewers to decode the mystery and stay engaged overall the thumbnail combines realism, tension, and symbolic colour to appeal to a young audience seeking shock value, suspense, and deeper analyses within the true crime genre.

our research strongly informed how our documentary uses and challenges conventions of the crime genre. Typical crime documentaries often include close-up shots, CCTV footage, real life evidence, and dark Loki interview settings that create us tense and eerie atmosphere. They also rely on discord in background music to build up emotion and suspense while editing usually switches between fast pace flashes glitches and flashbacks to keep audiences engaged. We conform to many of these conventions by using CCTV footage, close-up of evidence, quick edits that link interview content with real footage, making the information clear and more engaging for viewers. However, we also subverted convention in several ways. Instead of focusing on the stereotypical older male psychopath, we entered the story around a young female student making the narrative more shocking and unique. We also avoided bloody or violent imagery, since the crime involved a chemical gas bombing which gave the film a more distinct and unexpected tone. Finally, we broke away from plain white titles by using both yellow Texas symbolise hazard and danger which makes the branding more eye catching. Overall research on existing documentary shape our choices while allow allowing us to add originality.

Thumbnail (Research & Development)

This blog post contains the thumbnail research and development for our documentary project. My teammate (Tisha) did the research and I (Kristine) did the development.

Editing

This blog contains editing process for our documentary project. This was made by my teammate (Tisha).

Behind the Scenes

This is the behind the scene of our documentary project. This blog was made by my teammate (Tisha) and (Panji).