Prezzie presentation link:
https://prezi.com/view/1Oe8pXfEc9lXRefVG4Ad/
• How do your products represent social groups or issues?
• How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of ‘branding’?
• How do your products engage with the audience?
• How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
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How do your products represent social groups or issues?
For the main character slash narrator of our podcast, Vienna Raymond, we decided to make her British. Both as an homage to the podcast “The Magnus Archives” and also because people tend to unconsciously think of British people as academics. Vienna is canonically a smart character and to invoke that feeling of her academic and classy personality we chose the textbook British accent. We wanted the podcast to feel like an official police report and by using an accent commonly associated with factual documentaries the British accent felt like a perfect fit.
There isn’t much representation focus in our product since it’s a direct retelling of real events but the character of Viena conforms to the traditional thought of British people being classy, professional, and smart sounding. By using this stereotype a large number of listeners who already associate British accents to be professional and polite, the police recording narration setting of the podcast sounds more believable. If I were to have voiced Viena with a standard American accent the response wouldn’t be the same.
According to Stuart Hall in his theory of representation, the media doesn’t reflect meaning from reality, it creates meaning. Essentially the media constructs meanings based on stereotypes associated with certain groups. Some may be negative and some are positive. The classy and posh stereotype that’s associated with Viena’s accent is mostly positive as it tells the audience that they’re listening to an official report recording from an organization and that what they’re about to hear is going to be factual and well presented.
How do the elements of your production work together to create a sense of “branding”?
The genre of unsolved crime has been popular for a very long time. Our podcast sticks with a lot of the unsolved crime genre-defining features like the forensics aspect of the cases along with the mystery in history within the cases. The setting of the podcast is the audience hearing a case file recording from a police report. The narration is similar to the style of how forensics reports were written which helps with the forensics side of the genre. In the first episode featuring the mystery of the Black Dahlia, I wrote a small segment of a fake coroner’s report to make the document sound more legitimate.
When an audience hears “Unsolved Cases” they will think of mysteries without answers, cases that have long gone cold, and the intense desire to know more about what happened behind closed doors. Viena even admits at the end of every episode that she has her own conclusions but the case is still forever a mystery. An audience also expects a dreary and glum atmosphere because the majority of unsolved crimes people are highly interested in contain graphic topics like murder. We kept that atmosphere with the faint sound of Viena’s heartbeat in the audio along with the slow and suspenseful background music. The bed of the audio contains many sound effects such as stabbing, bloody guts and screams to create the feeling that the audience isn’t just listening to a police report but also living through the events. This is what defines our podcast’s branding as it is a window to these crimes while still holding the mystery of the crimes true to heart.
In Steve Neale’s genre theory, people gravitate toward genres because they are both familiar enough that the audience knows what to expect but different enough that it is memorable. People want the macabre and mystery of unsolved crime but they also want a unique take on the very familiar crimes they already know. The ability to come to individual conclusions is what makes this genre so interesting. In the Unsolved Podcast, we did just that, stuck to the conventions that defined the genre while adding our own spin to make it interesting.
How do your products engage with the audience?
Our podcast would hypothetically be aired on Spotify since it’s the world’s most used audio entertainment platform. Spotify lets users follow each other’s accounts and share playlists with each other. So if someone were to have “Unsolved” on their podcast it will be shared within their list of friends. We also have an Instagram page for the podcast which is meant for fans and listeners of the podcast to interact directly with us via comments, story polls, question tabs, and direct messaging. The comments sections would be a place for us to answer questions directly and publicly at length and it’s also the main place where the audience would interact with each other. Features on Instagram stories like the questions box and the polls would help us the creators focus on podcast topics our audience will be interested in by having the audience directly choose what they will get for the next upload. An audience is more likely to stay and engage with a show if they can interact with the creators directly.
The rise of new media has definitely made creating an original podcast easier. Spotify is a form of new media since instead of pitching the podcast idea to a studio we are able to upload the show directly on the site. New media has enabled the rise of niche content which is exactly what our podcast is. It is able to exist among the slew of mainstream content while also standing a chance of having its own audience.
Our audience is able to listen to each episode and draw their own conclusions. Due to the very nature of unsolved crimes having many loose ends, the audience may have different interpretations of the show. They may take the case at face value which is the preferred reading. Or they may have different thoughts on how the crime was committed, which is a more negotiated reading where they come up with their own conclusion.
How did your research inform your products and the way they use or challenge conventions?
At the beginning of the project, we were tasked to make a survey and see what podcast elements our target audience of teenagers liked. My group focused more on the type of cases people are interested in, the style of storytelling, and how graphic our podcast can be. And after sending the survey to 50 people, we concluded that older western crime from before the 50s is the most popular. People prefer a narrator telling them a direct story rather than following it like a narrative. And probably due to desensitization, many of our survey results conclude that the majority of people don’t mind violent and graphic cases like murder.
After researching many different podcasts relating to our genre my team settled on two podcasts: Solved Crimes and The Magnus Archives. We took inspiration from Solved Crimes for the structure of the podcast and how the story was told through a narrator. For the setting, I took heavy inspiration from The Magnus Archives which is a podcast set as an archive recording. The introduction of Viena is a direct homage to the introduction of Jonathan Sims from TMA, via introducing herself as an archivist for an organization that focuses on things that are unknown.
We stuck with the forensics and mystery aspect of most unsolved crime shows. For the most part, we stuck to conventions associated with the genre, by keeping the dreary atmosphere and graphic nature. The one subversion I feel like we did do is that the listener is no longer just hearing the cases like a story. Even if the podcast is in a narrator format we added enough elements that it allows the audience to fully immerse in the story, like they’re witnessing the cases as the police report states.
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