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THE ANATOMY OF A MURDER


AMERICAN MURDER: THE FAMILY NEXT DOOR NETFLIX KNICKERBOCKERGLORY


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Director Jenny Popplewell explains how social media allowed the team to capture the unfolding narrative of a horrific crime


It is not new to tell a story through archive material. But when Director Jenny Popplewell first heard about Chris Watts – a family man from Colorado whose pregnant wife Shanann and two young daughters went missing in August 2018 – she was struck by the thought that the story might lend itself to something unique. “I first saw articles about Chris Watts being


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arrested after Shanann went missing, then read the social news feeds, and watched the video of him doing a crocodile tears-type interview calling for her safe return,” she recalls. Then the bodies of his wife and two little girls


were found two days after they disappeared, Watts was quickly arrested, then charged with four counts of first-degree murder. “They seemed such a normal couple,”


Popplewell observes. “It just stuck with me.” When the local police released their


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bodycam footage, she continues, she “went down the rabbit hole again”. But the turning


point came when, some months later, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation released film of an undercover interview with Watts, who was by then serving life sentences in jail, in which he was asked: why?


WE WANTED SHANANN TO BE AT THE CENTRE OF THIS STORY – NOT THE MURDERER


“It suddenly struck me how this felt like


the first time a crime had been captured entirely on camera. There have been some amazing archive documentary portraits. But this felt like it would be an unfolding narrative,” she says. Played out through Ring doorbell footage, social media, phone cameras, police bodycams, and Shanann’s text message digital legacy, it is, she adds: “a story for our times.” Through Freedom of Information requests and a small fee, Popplewell accessed a vast


Roundtable Post Production is an independent post facility that specialises in high-end documentaries delivering to streamers, cinema, distributors and broadcasters. The hugely experienced team has been curated for their passion and knowledge of all things documentary.


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From post producers that are used to shifting complex schedules, edit support that fully understands the demands of an edit, to conform artists that are able to upscale and add detail back into archive


that might have seemed impossible, to a sound team used to creating fully textured soundscapes with a delicate touch to the picture team helping get the most out of the images so that audiences can be


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