Documentary poster analysis

The Last Dance is a 2020 documentary on Micheal Jordan and the 1997-98 Chicago Bulls and their journey to win the championship for the 6^th time. The documentary mini series focuses on Jordan’s career from his time playing college basketball to his final season of his career with the Bulls. The documentary features interviews with his teammates and coaches, insider information, and the trials and tribulations of playing basketball at the highest level in the NBA.

The target audience of this documentary is fans of the NBA and basketball fans who are 15 to 49 years old. The target audience may also be comprised of older fans that watched Micheal Jordan play in the NBA but were interested in what happened to the team off the court. Another target audience may be Chicago Bulls fans as MJ was the greatest player of all time to be on the team. The primary demographic is usually men as fans of the NBA and people who enjoy competitive documentaries about greatness and maintaining it are usually male. All classes within society can enjoy the documentary as MJ started off working class and had to work his way to greatness which is relatable to working class individuals. The aspects of striving beyond mediocrity can resonate with middle class viewers too which is the core audience for the documentary as they are the main group with access to ESPN and Netflix prestige documentaries of this style. There may also be a large upper middle-class audience that may resonate more with how MJ maintained his greatness in the most competitive era of NBA history and didn’t let others overshadow his legacy.

Analysis of poster- The poster features the 3 most notable players on the ’97 Chicago Bulls, including Micheal Jordan, Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman. The photos of the players were taken from footage of their games. Jordan himself was featured 3 times in this poster, this shows his significance to the documentary and how he will be the main focus for the documentary. The main image depicts Micheal Jordan shooting the ball while falling back slightly, this showing his devotion for the game and the skill required to make difficult shots under pressure. The colour scheme is black, red and white. This is a subtle nod to the colours of the Chicago Bulls and fits well with the branding and colour scheme of Netflix, where the series was aired. Jordan is the only person in the poster that is depicted in colour. This yet again emphasises Jordan’s importance to the team and shows what the documentary will be about. The poster uses a clean white font to clearly state the name of the documentary, how many parts it will be and when the first episodes will be put onto streaming services. The title is sizable but does not take up a large section of the poster, and below it shows the streaming service where the documentary will be played.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hearts and Minds is a 1974 Vietnam War documentary created by Peter Davis, the documentary uses footage from interviews and footage from the war without narration to allow the audience to make up their own minds about the messaging in the documentary. The target audience of this documentary is usually university educated, middle-class adults or students with usually left leaning political views. The way the poster appeals to such an audience is through the serious tone in which the poster is depicted as the muted colour scheme of beige, white and black with no distinguishing features on the people or helicopters. This is because the poster is targeting a more intellectual audience that will not watch the documentary for entertainment purposes, instead it being used as an unbiased piece of evidence in study of the Vietnam War and violent conflict in general.

Hearts and Minds was received very well by audiences and critics, it even won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 1975 at the Academy Awards. It also holds a respectable 8.2/10 on IMDb from 106,000 user ratings. It’s re-release even scored an 8.3 from users which shows how even audiences today respond well to the documentary and it shows how profound it was for it’s time.

 

The Other Dream Team

The Other Dream Team is a 2012 sports documentary directed by Marius Markevicius. It shows the cultural significance of the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona for Lithuania as they win a bronze medal in basketball against the former Soviet States that they were forced to be a part of until 1991. The documentary highlights not just high-level sporting ability but also the large cultural impact caused by the event, reinforcing national unity even when just the year before, the Soviet government violently cracked down on Lithuanian civilians that wanted freedom from the communist regime and injured hundreds of people by firing off live ammunition into the unarmed crowd around the Lithuanian Seimas. The documentary follows the Lithuanian national basketball team and their journey from an almost forgotten nation to one of the best basketball teams in the world in the 90s.

 

The poster for the documentary is very symbolic and has many different themes within it that allow it to attract it’s target audience. The colour scheme of the documentary poster reflects the 3 colours of the Lithuanian flag, yellow, green and red. In the first image it shows a real picture from Lithuania in the early 90s when the USSR drove tanks into the capital to disperse the gathering of people peacefully protesting for freedom. The second image in green depicts a young boy holding a sign saying ‘freedom for Lithuania’ which shows the struggle for Lithuanian independence. The third image contrasts from the first two as the atmosphere is not bleak and the basketball team is all smiling and seemingly joyous after they won bronze medals. The stark contrast between the images has been done to show how much freedom from oppressive regimes has helped to build a better future for people and how much cultural impact one game of basketball can have on all of eastern Europe. The font at the top used is a clean font in a bronze colour saying  ‘sometimes bronze is sweeter than gold’, this shows how sometimes even bronze can be more impactful than gold as it represents the struggle for freedom from tyranny and independence.  The title is written in a soviet style lettering for all words other than ‘other’ which is in a larger font and filled in with the design of the Lithuanian basketball tie dyed uniform used in the Olympics.

 

The popularity of the documentary was limited as it was not released in many theatres, but it was received well by audiences with an 88% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes from over 1000 reviews and an 8.3 from IMDb which had over 100,000 votes. The documentary only grossed around 135,000 dollars in box office revenue as it’s release was limited to a small number of theatres.