"BECOMING: JOSH CHESTER" Creative Critical Reflection

The documentary series “BECOMING:” features the story of a different athlete in each episode. The first episode of the series, “BECOMING: Josh Chester” shares the entirety of Josh’s baseball career from his wiffle ball days to playing college ball. However, the extract from the episode focuses on the later parts of his career, ultimately ending with an injury. Throughout the doc extract and the Instagram page, Josh represents the social group of injured athletes. Although one may hear about an injured athlete every now and then in the media, their media presence pretty much dies after the injury, unless they make some kind of a comeback.

Josh had a story that differed from the rest, and that’s what caught my interest. When presented with the choice of academics or athletics, Josh never settled for only one. This was proven in his rejection of the draft offered by the Minnesota Twins, shown in the docuseries extract. Instead he chose to play baseball in college where he excelled in both academics and athletics, never letting the opportunity of receiving a college education go. Because of this, he had a backup plan to lean on after the injury, a major in Accounting that got him to the job he’s at today. From the start, this was an issue I wanted to address. There are athletes left with little to show for after a career ending injury, unless they are a professional athlete that made their money. The choices Josh made allowed him to still succeed, despite the injury. Although he mostly represents an injured athlete in these two products, there is more to him than just a career cut short, and this part of him is seen in the magazine article.

When discussing how I came up with the idea in the article, Josh was brought up because of the joke he made that funnily enough inspired me to make the docuseries on him and other athletes. The magazine revealed that although his baseball career was over, he was still proud of what he got from baseball, which is also touched upon towards the end of the extract as he begins to list the best things he obtained from playing the sport, representing a proud athlete.

This sense of pride was a major component when it came to branding. Using a brand identity prism, I began to put together what made up the brand of the “BECOMING: Josh Chester” doc extract. The target audience, males ranging from 15-55 years old of mid to high socioeconomic status with an interest in sports, saw themselves with the potential to become or further succeed as an athlete. The final parts of the extract in which Josh describes the lifelong friends he made from playing baseball serves as a reflection of the values of the brand: sportsmanship and building bonds between teammates. Further, the culture of the brand is demonstrated most through the interview element in which Josh describes the rewards of being a dedicated baseball player, like winning championships. This creates the sense of hard work leading to meeting one’s goals on the field, also known as the culture of the brand.

There was also repetition of the same three or four colors that I noticed throughout the footage, which created a physique for the brand as I began to use these colors: blue, green, white and black, for all the products. Although there is more variation of colors in the extract, both the Instagram page remain consistent with these colors as well as font choice. The font isn’t exactly the same for the Instagram and magazine article, but they are both the same style, bold, sans-serif and simple. Lastly, the title serves as a major component of the brand as the word “becoming” describes the process of coming to be, the purpose of the docuseries; to hear the athlete’s perspective of how they came to be who they are today.

The social media platform, Instagram is the product that engages most with the audience because of multiple posts that urge for viewer feedback. To exemplify this, there’s a post published with a blurred image of an athlete captioned, “The first athlete featured in the “BECOMING:” docuseries! Can you guess who it might be?” Not only does this post garner excitement and anticipation, but it also creates interaction with the audience. The Instagram hashtags are put to use on every post to catch the attention of the primary audience. Hashtags such as “#sports, #sportsdocumentary, #baseballplayer, #baseballlife, #athlete” with hundreds of thousands of viewers on each hashtag are included for users to find content from the page. Often when Instagram users attempt to find content that interests them, they use hashtags to search, eventually encountering pages like mine. Another thing people often like to do is see how a film they like was made, and this is how the magazine article works with the audience, by presenting the viewer with an athlete they have heard of and may even admire and sharing more of their lives with them. The doc extract also engages the audience, but in a minor way which is sharing an experience they can relate to. Whether it be because they are an athlete, student athlete, a fan of sports, or even someone who has sustained a sports related injury, there is something that each audience member can resonate with.

This was something I wanted to ensure when creating the products, but in order to do so I had to get to know the audience and the genre itself. The sports documentary sub-genre has common characteristics such as use of interviews, archives, re-enactments, voiceover narration, handheld cameras, intercutting/parallel editing and selective editing. Most of these genre conventions make up my doc extract but there were some I chose to challenge, like the re-enactments. Part of my research process was watching sports documentaries, but I never liked how the re-enactments or dramatizations took away from a serious situation. This was something I wanted to avoid, especially when discussing an injury, so I purposely chose to leave out any re-enactment. However, this didn’t work to the advantage of the extract as it felt like it was missing something at times in which the talking head interviews got boring. I learned that the re-enactments were almost necessary to keep the eye entertained. Lighting was another issue I encountered, which I also didn’t realize until I began to edit the footage. The lights were a bit dim, and they weren’t placed in the correct spots to illuminate the interview, but I did learn a quick fix to this problem would be to do a couple tests before filming and lighting proves to be an issue, change the setting, or bring in more light.

Looking back, the process of creating these products taught me something major: how to tell someone’s story.