Evaluation

1. EVALUATION… By Edd Breeze

2. In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Before we started creating our own soap trailer, we started doing research on examples of soap trailers from popular soaps, such as Eastenders, Coronation Street and Hollyoaks. After watching a few different soap teaser trailers we started to see two different styles of a soap trailer, the one type being a short and intense trailer lasting from 30 seconds to the highest of 50 seconds and the other type of soap trailer’s were longer and gave more explanation and dialogue to their trailers. After looking at both types of trailers of various popular soaps, we decided we liked the elements of both types of trailers and that we would like a longer trailer but still having the intense element throughout the trailer. Once we decided on what type of trailer we wanted we then began to research into the storylines and settings, we found that the more popular trailers had contained either returning characters, disaster weddings, pregnancy or murder. After a lot of research and discussion over which one of these storylines we preferred and were wanting to do we decided to follow a popular soap trailer element of a returning character, we thought of this idea as we thought the most successful storylines that our group have watched were of the element of a returning character and also the sense of mystery always keeps the audience watching. Costumes After watching examples of soap trailers we found that the costumes of the characters were important as they were showing their personalities and in some cases sets the storyline such as wedding dresses and suits etc. As well as looking into other examples of soap trailers we looked into our target audience and also our characters that we have created, we started to look into what there personalities could be like and went from there to decided our costumes.

3. In what ways does your media products use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? Location During our discussion of where we wanted our location, we started to put our story together first so we could get more of an idea of what location would suit our trailer best. Firstly we knew from the start that we would be shooting the teaser trailer inside a home and so we thought of all the main key props we need from our location to narrow down where we could film, such as, a long room, table, steps down to a door etc. Thankfully we found that one of our group members had a location just perfect for our storyline and for what we wanted, once we had our storyline, location and type of soap trailer sorted, we needed to finally choose our costumes for our trailer, Music & Credits After watching examples of soap teaser trailer’s we found that they either used dialogue with music, dialogue without music or just music through the trailer. Our group decided that we wanted to had music throughout with a hint of dialogue when doing the countdown for new years and also for the voice over at the ending credits.For our song choice we decided we would try and find a modern twist to the famous new years song “Au Lang Syne”, but unfortunately we couldn’t find a version of this song that would target our young target audience.After searching for a modernized version of “Au Lang Syne” that we couldn’t find we decided to widen our search for a song that involves the theme of new years eve/day. We narrowed our two song choices down to Sugababes – new years song and also Charlie Hall – New Years Day, after watching the trailer along with both choices of songs we found that Charlie Hall – New Years Day was more in sync with our teaser trailer and worked better overall.

4. How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts? For our soap trailer, our ancillary texts consisted of a soap magazine cover and a poster advertising our soap trailer.Firstly we started researching examples of soap opera magazines such as “Soaplife” and “Inside Soap”. We found that they used various bright colours and short sentences such as “Murder” and “Heart break” , also they use lots of pictures whether they’re from a photo shoot set up for an exact storyline or out of a soap scene and also they leave very little space empty on the magazine cover.For the magazine we were told that all the pictures featured on our magazine had to be ones we had created ourselves rather than just adding some from old soap storylines, so for this we decided that we would simply try and copy some of the magazines storylines and pictures but still keeping our soap trailer the main storyline and picture of the magazine cover. Below are the pictures we took for our sub storylines on the magazine cover. For our soap poster, we tried to make sure that there is a definite link between the soap magazine and the poster.We decided to focus our whole poster on our mystery returning character rather than making it about the couple using characters from the soap teaser trailer and making sure that it still stays a mystery on the poster. We approached this idea by thinking that we would use a piece of jewelry (ring) and also the mystery character’s shoes to get the audience guessing of whom our returning character is. As we were running out of time our location wasn’t as good as we wanted, we decided the best place was a place with a blank wall so that our mystery character stood out with her signature accessories, also our group decided that our mystery character needed more than just her standing their, we needed to make sure it linked so we added in the important letter from our soap trailer so that their was more going on within the poster. Hollyoaks Soap Poster

5. What have you learnt from your audience feedback? For our feedback we gave out sheets to the class whilst they watched our soap trailer, the questions involved were “does the video production fit into generic conventions successfully?”, whether they were any improvements to be made and what was good and bad about the video and also who they thought our target audience were.Bad feedback we received were that some scenes were too dark and that some of the shots were repeated but from a different angle and it got a bit boring, but apart from that our overall feedback was very successful. The good feedback we received were praises saying that “the music went well with the advert of the soap trailer” and also some saying “everything fitted well with the time of the year and the theme of the soap trailer”. For one of our questions we found that overall the majority of our class guessed that our target audience was aimed at teenagers to young adults which is what we aimed our target audience to be.

6. How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages? Throughout our task of creating a soap opera trailer, we found using media technologies such as youtube, bbc iplayer and itv player, these technologies helped us a lot when trying to research into examples of soap opera trailers and also on just researching into different soaps to get some ideas.For producing our soap opera trailer we used software on the apple macs, these softwares were final cut, garage band and photoshop, we found using these softwares we could create our video the way we wanted.