Evaluation write up q2

1. Christie McVay
Evaluation Write Up
Q2. HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN ANDANCILLARY TEXT?
The combination of the 3 tasks has meant that I am able to advertise my soap in
many different platforms. By creating these different products it means that I can
reach my audience through different means. There are two ancillary task that are my
magazine front cover and my soap opera poster; these were both created on Adobe
Photoshop. I did this because Photoshop is a simple yet effective way of designing
and making images that are able to be made to a high quality that can help me
create the images and the texts that I want from my magazine front cover. I also
found it useful while making my poster for that accompanies that front cover. I
wanted to convey a sense of drama that is unique to my trailer as we have used the
simple idea of using the board game “Guess Who?” This helps portray a multi-
stranded narrative that we have made for the trailer.
I have done it so that all the texts have all got some element of Guess who
incorporated into it to try and keep it all coherent and so that all the texts relate to
each other and come together. I think that because they’re 3 different types of
advertisements it means that different people can see it. When you are out you will
see the poster on billboards, when you are in the newsagents you will see the
magazine and then when you are watching the tele you will see it then. This means
that you can potentially see it frequently through the day, which means it’ll leave it
in your mind and then you will most likely, due to the amount of advertisement,
watch the soap.
The ancillary tasks were in individual task, which we did to have as an extra on top of
the trailer. The work produced for the front cover of the magazine and the poster
was all inspired by the work we did in the trailer. The ancillary tasks were done after
the trailer so that I could use the photos from the trailer and the story lines for the
magazine. For the ancillary tasks I took the inspiration of the same soaps as we did
for the trailer. So for example with the trailer we used the inspiration of Eastenders
and Hollyoaks so I also, to keep too coherent, used posters from these two soaps so
that it all linked together. Also because the theme of the trailer was murder, I
needed to keep the poster in with the style so I again kept it dark themed and also
incorporated the whole ‘Guess who’ theme.
In the trailer we used what Eastenders did when they released the Kat and Alfie
trailer where it was a western themed trailer about Kat returning to the square. So
like I said previously, we used the ‘Guess Who’ theme. We devised this idea from the
inspiration of EastEnders and then used the Hollyoaks multi stranded narrative
aspect. For their trailers they have very short snappy clips of the scenes which reveal
a lot but also doesn’t. So they will show a scene for one character and it will be short
so only long enough to see their facial expressions and where they are. This is a
clever idea which we had to exploit (Abercrombie). The target audience for
programs like Hollyoaks and Eastenders is a young age group of 16-25 which is who
we aimed our trailer at so to use their trailers for inspiration made a lot of sense.

2. Christie McVay
Throughout the trailer there was a lot of use of the colour red! This was our enigma
clue to what had happened. We thought that this signifies death and blood so it
would be in keeping with the trailer. In the trailer we repeated from EastEnders the
voice over at the end of it saying where the programme will be shown and what
time. Even down to the ident we used a lot of the inspiration from EastEnders again
because most soap idents are pretty simple, there just the name in a box or a road
sign. So we repeated this with our one and tried to create a road sign which said
‘Upon Thames’ because it seemed a popular thing to do. This is something which my
audience will like as soaps are stereotypically watched at home in the front room as
a family so a road sign is something people can relate to and personally identify with
(Katz) and the more the audience can relate to the soap the more they will enjoy it
and will decide to watch it again.
Unlike soap operas, where there is a ‘strong women’ theme through the program
and the trailers. For example, Peggy was a key example of this as she was the
landlord/bar lady who brought up a tough family and she called the shots. The use of
strong women is a technique most soaps share because the facts and stats show that
it is women who watch the soaps more than men, so this use of a strong women
would make the programme more appealing to the women dominated audience and
make them feel empowered. However we chose to challenge this and had a more of
a tough guy theme because we are aiming less at middle aged women to a younger
demographic because it’s something BBC2 what to improve on. So the idea of
murder and a main male character was something that we did to try to reach our
target audience.
I did the poster I created based of the Hollyoaks poster, this poster was set out in a
way that the characters faces were next to each other along the top and bottom and
then the Hollyoaks ident in the middle. The images were then edited to be pink over
the image and blue of the image. Blue for the boys, pink for the girls. So, to repeat
this (Steve Neale) I used the images that we took to put into the guess who board
game into my poster to add continuity. They were then put into place and then I
added a black and white effect to the image to make them look dull to represent to
dark storyline and then to repeat the Hollyoaks poster, I inserted a pink square over
the top and made it opaque and then the same for the boys but blue. This in my
opinion worked really well and it made them all bounces off each other because the
different tasks did well to complement each other.
With the soap opera magazine front cover, I thought that I needed to include story
liens which were key things and issues that are in society which is a “window into the
world” (Zeitgeist). I repeated (Steve Neale) the conventions from the ‘What’s on TV’
magazine which helped me get the layout of the magazine page, I noticed that they
use a lot of colours and there is not much of an order or neat look about it. Soap
opera magazines are quite different from other magazines as they are quite basic
and simple in the way that they don’t use a lot of detailed sentences, they keep it
pretty easy to read. The target audience that soaps tend to have is stereotypically
the lower and middle class families and the stories in them tend to stay pretty

3. Christie McVay
relevant to issues that these groups of people would face. So the way they present
their magazine is done in accordance.
My magazine front cover has a layout similar to the soap magazines I researched, I
particularly looked at ‘What’s on TV’ for inspiration and I noticed that all of them
were relitivly similar. They all use a lot of block colours and a lot of reds and yellows
and so I did also. From the top to the bottom of the page; there is a yellow block
which has a cover line inside it that has a matching image. From the ones I looked at
there was one where it said about a killer being revealed and as my actual trailer is
about that I exploited this convention. I liked the way it was above the actual title
because it is something which I have only ever seen with soap magazines and no
other genre so it made sense to incorporate this. Below that then was the title which
was in a bold/fat font along with the other pieces of text in the magazine as bold text
was defiantly something which stood out in the magazines. They didn’t use neat, tidy
fonts they only really used bubbly fonts so this is why I repeated it. Then there is a
cover line with a matching image to the middle left of the page which was boarded
with a yellow to make it jump out of the page like the other soaps did. To the right of
this, across the middle and right hand side of the page I have the main story which
has the biggest images and then a cover line which goes across. This cover line is
surrounded by a red bubbly effect. After this there are 3 stories along the bottom
which have smaller stories. All these conventions are very much so just on soap
magazines so I thought it would be crucial to include them because it seems very
apparent that it is unique to soap mags. I think that the conventions on these
magazines are very much so done so that it will target a certain type/class of people.
The conventions used are targeted to a more of a blue collar community in the way
that it presents itself.
I then thought that an even better way to reach my target audience of 16-25 year
olds would be to have some use of social media, so this is why I decided to add In a
twitter logo a trending hashtag of ‘#GuessWhoUT’. So my audience can say there
thoughts towards ‘Upon Thames’ and who they suspect had done it.