This blog post contains my (Nayana) critical self-reflection
This term's project was to make the opening of a documentary lasting about 3-5 minutes with our chosen subgenre. The genre my group chose was mockumentary with heavy involvement from high school students, we incorporated many stereotypes that one could see in school. This whole process created our product, Dave(s).
How do your products represent social groups or issues?
Our end product, Dave(s), took the theme of high school students with the same name but very contrasting lifestyles and personalities. We mentioned many stereotypes in our documentary; athlete, soft boy, player, creepy, happy, and even a character representing an "unfit" member of a group. These had their own representations in media previously. Athletes commonly identified as jocks are usually shown as stupid and idiotic narcissists who only care for themselves and their love for sports. We also included a happy Dave which is also a soft representation of the LGBTQ community, shown in a positive light, specifically of the gay people. We conform to all stereotypes in an extreme way and portray them in our modified and satirical method. Hopefully, this could give our mockumentary a more comedic effect and all the audience can enjoy, laugh, and relate to it. We also made sure we gave an equal light to all representatives we chose to portray, this way, we express a high-school ecosystem, with no ultimate main character to show how a main character in one's life can be a side character in another. We added many types of Daves to represent the whole school community, challenging the audience to find their personal identity (UGT from Blumler and Katz) by relating to the characters and finding themselves through the representation. Through the many conventions and expressions, we also challenged Stuart Hall's reception theory, which may suggest audience acknowledges the directors' message in the mockumentary and perceives the delivery from the directors. Through our product, we will eliminate prejudice within stereotypes and promote not judging a book by its cover.
How do your products engage with the audience?
Our main method of engaging and capturing audiences' interests is by relating to them. As we target high school students, aged 15-25, we use characters that they can relate to; utilizing people they would typically see in a high school or probably even be. hence psychographically reaching them. According to Blumler and Katz's uses and gratification theory, specifically personal identity, our audience can find themselves in our mockumentary as one of the Dave perhaps especially when we closely relate to the subcultures that exist in their environment. For example, those who are described as highly egotistical and confident about themselves can relate to player Dave or muscle Dave. Not only high school, but we also make use of the existing meme culture, from the meme we watched that became the inspiration and blueprint for "Dave(s)" which was the "Josh Fight 2021" where countless Josh gathered to do a mock showdown to see who deserves to be the best "Josh". We decided to rotate around this as how much we know the power the internet and the meme culture have on our target audience and how they very much use this technology and engage with it for most of their life. This made our target audience broader than just high-school students to challenge the general population who saw the meme. This is an application of Roland Barthes' cultural code, how our audience needs to be previously familiar with meme culture and trends. All our characters are portrayed in a way that is exaggerated and purposely contradicting to add more to the comedic effects and absurdity of our mockumentary without losing the essence of a documentary. This would make Dave(s) an application of diversion, uses and gratification theory as the audience may consume it as entertainment. Our final thumbnail elements are also one of the ways we entice the audience, through the picture of all the Daves together, can be visually attractive as the audience can see the different Daves in one place expressing their own personality.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
Before we began our documentary we did prior research on what we wanted to make, out of all the different sub-genres, we chose to make a mockumentary as we found it most interesting and fun in comparison. Then we started researching existing mockumentaries including American Vandals and Cunk on Earth. Those are the mockumentaries that inspired us the most, whether it is the flow and elements contained. Through Steve Neale's genre theory, we also realized these existing conventions set expectations and we managed to fulfill all the expected conventions. We discovered the typical conventions mockumentaries have and decided to follow most of them. In many scenes, we added more serious music to depict satirical elements and have mock seriousness shown in our interviews. We should have put more explicit jokes in our mockumentary alike others to clearly show the documentary aspect of our product. Other convention we conformed in our own mockumentary includes the use of interviews and montages shot in a hand-held manner. Through my research, I also wanted to make sure that we introduced all characters well through our introduction as that would be a significant part of attracting the audience. We also followed many conventions for each character personally; for example, Happy Dave (LGBTQ) is more attracted to feminity which is shown through his attire which is a pink hoodie (pink is stereotyped as a feminine color). Many mockumentaries also allowed actors to go off-script, including Trailer Park Boys, 2001 and Best in Show, 2000. This unintentional improvisation adds more to the film's comedic charm hence what we did in Dave(s) as well, all actors were allowed to improvise and personalize their scenes making it more humorous for the audience and natural for the actors.
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