Critical self reflection - Podcast

My team and I have created a podcast for this project, along with a social media page and merchandise. In our podcast "Unsolved" we discuss true classic unsolved crime cases the targetted audience are people aged 15-19 years. We made two episodes for our podcast, the first episode of our podcast is about the Black Dahlia and the second episode is about Jack The Ripper.

How do your products represent social groups or issues?

In our podcast, we use white people as our representation. How we ended up to this conclusion is from analyzing a survey we conducted on our fellow students. Based on the data we analyzed from the survey we conducted, most of the students prefer classic western crimes. The representation of our true crime podcast conforms to traditional thinking as we use white British stereotypical people. Our main character Vienna Reymonds is a white, British policewoman, spoken with a stereotypical British accent. As Stuart Hall’s representation theory states that representation in media shapes the understanding of a character, it makes it easier for the audience to differentiate characters from other characters. We chose this stereotype for our since our main character Vienna Reymonds works at the United Nation department it would be perfect for her to have a British accent as it depicts our character as highly educated and this conforms to post-colonialism since white people were depicted as people with power.

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

As Steve Neale’s genre theory stated, media text must conform to genre conventions so that it is easily recognizable and yet also subvert them enough to make them unique. We have researched some true crime podcasts and analyzed the key elements of what a true crime podcast is. Usually, in true crime podcast cover art’s, they would usually feature a dark color scheme, blood splatter, and red strings. The color red conforms to the genre conversion of our podcast as it gives the audience an idea of what the contents of the podcast are. So we added those color schemes to our thumbnail art and our social media post as it gives the audience a picture of what they should expect from our podcast. For our podcast title, we came up with “Unsolved” as it is simple and straightforward, and it has connotations that audiences can easily identify. By having the same visual elements we can attract audiences that are already familiar with the genre to create a sense of branding.

How do your products engage with the audience?

My team and I created a social media page on Instagram, to advertise our podcast by posting sneaks-peeks of our episodes and to interact with our audience. As new media develops, we can interact with our audience by making interactive polls, Q&As, and suggestion boxes on our Instagram posts. We use these methods so that the audience can be more active by interacting with us. Audiences can also interact in the comment section of our social media posts. In the comment section, they could discuss theories of the crime cases that we discuss in our podcast and by doing so, the audiences could build a community amongst themselves. We also made merchandise for our podcast so that the audiences can contribute to us in some way by buying our merchandise, not only the audiences can interact with us but they also support our production. Audiences can also spread our social media website by sharing our posts with their friends.

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

I listened to a variety of podcasts ranging from anime culture, life advice/therapy, to true crime. Each podcast that I have explored had different formats like narrative storytelling, host conversations, and discussion. After we listened to a true crime podcast, “Solved Murders” we liked how they used both narrative and narrator-based storytelling, but what we dislike was how they used multiple narrators which made it really hard to follow the story. So we decided to have two speakers for our podcast, one as the narrator and the other one doing the intro and outro. We took inspiration from “The Magnus Archives” for the concept of a police officer reading crime files. And we also took inspiration from the podcast “Slow Burn” for their outro, advertisement, previews, social media account, and credits into our podcast.

Reflection

I have learned how to match my voice to the same genre conventions of our podcast. My teamwork skill has improved through countless discussions and from doing this project as this project cannot be done alone. We store our plans and ideas of our project through google docs as it can be easily accessed by everyone. The designs, scripts, and editing were mostly done by my teammates Kimi, Kanna, and Erina. 

Through the process of making this project, we have made some big and small adjustments to our podcast. We changed the title of our podcast after consulting with our teacher. At first, we came up with “Unsolved International” as our podcast title, but then it didn’t feel pleasant to the ear so after a much long discussion we finally settled on removing the “International” from the title to “Unsolved” only as our title.

I have made use of BlogSpot as a place to store my projects and research. It has helped me to track my progress on my project and also to track my research so that I can easily get back to it. Our teachers’ blog has helped us as a reference on how we should use our blog.