A Level Media Studies
In our brief, we were told to create a 3 to 5-minute documentary opening with our chosen sub-genre (of our choice). My group decided to do a 'health documentary' targeting general students and/or high-schoolers.
1. How do your products represent social groups of issues?
Diet or Die is a health expository documentary that centers on eating disorder awareness around teenagers. The social groups we represent are the people who have issue in eating especially eating disorder. We targeted our documentary to the gen Z audience ranged from 13 to 25 years old as the people from gen Z would most likely to be expose to this crucial mental health disorder as internet has improve vastly and they have mobile phone where they are capable of having social media application. In depth, the social media also represents stereotype about what is the ideal body to be considered as appealing and good-looking where people now are driven to follow the general representation of the ideology on what is considered as stunning. People started to perform diet where this lead to Eating Disorder become more common in the community. As the realm of media become more developed the media companies will pressured their artist or talents into certain diet or eating pattern to get the media's company's desired dream body. This issue happened to both gender male and female but primary female. Our documentary takes a unique approach, differing from mainstream media, by striving to raise awareness of the issue among various social groups. We achieve this by sharing personal stories, making our content more relatable to a wider audience where hence our audience may undergo the same path as our professionals.
2. How do your products engage with the audience?
This eating disorder documentary generally targets teenagers to young adults, students and/or high-schoolers. One way that helps us reach them would be through the title ". The audience we targeted are Gen z from the age of 13 to 25 years old as they are more prone to the eating disorders. Where these days Teens are expose to entertainment industry hence leading them to undergo the process for joining favorable entertainment industry don't often realize certain damaging effects. we try to adapt visual elements in the section such as, dramatic lighting, tense music, slow paced editing to create the tone we’d like to set in the documentary. We aim to use relatability as a strategy as, the interaction and engagement of spreading resources alongside creating a community where audiences feel at peace to share their stories could create more engagement and buzz towards our documentary. Uses and Gratification theory by Bulmer and Katz explores the different reasons why we seek out particular media products to satisfy our needs and desires. Our media product aims to target surveillance where audiences could become more aware of the surrounding world and issues that are starting to form in our youth today and find ways to spread awareness for any potential victims to not fall into the perplexing issue. Our thumbnail aims to add mystique with a title that could invoke hermeneutic code (5 Narrative codes) as it is titled “Diet or Die” where audiences are attempting to discover what does the documentary means by Diet or Die. Hanly as the Muay Thai athlete allows other's male demographic especially athlete to connect with the character and Mutiara as the model allows female demographic to connect with her and sharing the experience on the pressure on societal platform.
3. How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
The research really inform our documentary in terms of defining the health documentary by following the general convections such as Interview scene with gloomy tones setting and fixed camera position as I took reference from Crime documentary such as The Rain Coat Killer or American Vandal as the interview scenes were shot in fixed position and medium shot combined with the dark tone. By studying how to open documentary, general mental illness problem, thumbnails and participants experience the Health documentary directs audience to understand how serious is Eating Disorder in this social community by portraying the awareness of famed social media with billions of users on what happen if you typed eating disorder. Additionally by mentioning some disclaimer on people who had eating disorder to visit trusted resources shows how significant the topic that we bring through out the documentary. The research also helps me in understand what would the target audience expecting to see in health documentaries or documentary in general. Using cultural reference such as Korean beauty standards will make the audience to feel more relatable to our health documentary. Using some reference to Tiktok's montage of Kpop Idols are able to give a bigger picture about the Korean beauty standard and the comments popping about praising the Idol if they are skinny as this will significantly highlight how important it is to be able to bear with the Korean Beauty standard like Jennie in our documentary. On the other side if the Idol such as Liz from IVE didn't statisfies the Korean beauty standars there will be lots of hate from the audiences as we show it by some negative comments on Liz.
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