A2 Project

Evaluation
My media product as you can see from the blog was to produce a soap opera trailer and have a TV magazine front cover that featured the soap and also a poster advertising the soap. There are several ways that our media product uses, develops and challenges forms and conventions of real media products such as the general factors like storyline to the little things such as set. Typical conventions include regular characters that everybody can relate to (personal relations) this means that the audience feel like they know the characters as though they were talking about friends. Soap operas are a big part of our society today; they pull in a wide variety of audience and reflect all sorts of aspects of life. Soap’s story lines’ are part of string of multiple storylines that all come together, soap operas try and reflect real life and in this they keep the audience interested, this is known as “art imitating life”. In most soap operas when you have an ongoing storyline it may involve one particular group of characters. This will change over time once the story has been resolved. We tried to convey this in our own work by simple things such as similar sets (pubs and houses), which in most soaps they do by using regular locations generally where a mass of people would congregate, to characters that the audience would be able to relate to for different reasons. All soaps deal with different social issues, this is what makes them popular as they talk about the issues that, sometimes, not everybody knows about and can understand; such as teen pregnancy, alcohol and drugs.

I used several different media software and techniques to help me create my product. For example for the TV magazine front cover I used Photoshop software and for editing the movie I used, the Mac computer software, iMovie. When using Photoshop I was able to develop my skills from last year’s production as I was able to use a lot more trial and error to help create my TV magazine. For example using techniques such as blur and opacity, opacity was a vary useful technique in our TV magazine because of the fact that when we needed to create the other original soap opera and their slogans we were able to use opacity to fade the pictures so you can see the baubles behind them. This was to go with our Christmas theme all of this is shown on our blog.

Right at the very beginning we had to research the topic of soap operas and as you can see from the blog we created a PowerPoint to show this. We looked at their recent story lines and the major plots that they have as well as factors such as characters, places and audiences. This was all very useful as we could compare Coronation Street and Emmerdale and create something different. We looked at different techniques such as how the majority of the storylines always had a narrative equilibrium, where something happens that affects the characters and the struggle for them to get it back to normal. Also simple things such as; cliff-hangers at the end of every episode make the audience eager to watch the next episode to find out what happens next. We tried to use this technique in our work by simple snippets of the story line and a caption that would intrigue the audience to wanting more. All soaps are aimed at different audiences for example Hollyoaks is aimed at a younger audience compared to Emmerdale.

The planning for the trailer was very simple once we worked out the areas that we needed to focus on. We separated it in to different headings, such as storyline, place, characters, camera shots etc. Part of the planning was to also get the actors for our piece and for this we got two people that did A level drama. This was a good way for us to brainstorm our ideas, we came up with several ideas for storylines as you can see from the blog, but once we looked at other factors we decided to choose the idea of the “couple finding out their half-brother and sister.” We made sure that we wrote down a little bit of the story before and after so that we could try and show this in our trailer. This way it would look more realistic because the audience would know what had happened and would know the history of the characters. Factors such as the place was very difficult at first because if you look at original trailers you can see that there are generally several different places that is shown in the trailer, all of which the audience would recognise. We had to fit the place to the storyline and this is when we realised it would have to be in a house. Due to the fact that we had chosen a Christmas theme we had to have Christmas decorations up on our set which was also a challenge. Looking at Barthes Narrative code of when one things happen in a story and the audience know that this is going to lead to something else (one thing leads to another). For example if there was a wedding on a soap opera then the audience can expect for something to go wrong. So for our trailer we made sure that we had close up shots of the birth certificate and the couple looking at it so that the audience would be able to have an incline of what they can look forward to in the upcoming episodes.

Once we had started looking at storyboard ideas and the shots that we were thinking of using we could begin filming. We started by simply taking some simple shots of people walking towards a door, opening it and walking through. This was very useful as we had a chance to practice and play around with the effects and software on the Mac computers, iMovie. We learnt to use different effects such as tempo as well as changing the colour and style of the footage. We found that we could add sounds and change the pitch of them as well. This was very useful because when we came to start editing we were able to put in a lot more effects then if we hadn’t had time to use trial and error methods of using the different tools of the software.

We researched into TV magazines and looked at why a reader would be interested in reading the articles about the soap operas. Once we had our basic idea we than began to look at our TV magazine and how to create it. We researched into TV magazines and looked at the themes and colours and styles that all of them used. There was one particular front cover that we took a lot of inspiration from as you can see on the blog called “We love telly”. We liked a lot of these ideas and transformed them into our piece. This is where I developed my skills on Photoshop as a lot of TV magazine was edited constantly for example even the title “TV Talent” had several effects to it as well as little Christmas icons added to the picture. All of these little skills that I learnt were very useful when doing the bigger parts of the magazine for example cutting out the picture of the couple was normal a very hard thing for me to grasp using the Magnetic Lasso Tool but then I discovered the Quick Selection Tool and was very simply able to select the parts of the picture that I wanted.

In the past two years I have had several opportunities to use Photoshop for different products such as, school magazine music magazine and in this project a TV magazine. All of the pieces that I have produced using Photoshop have got better as each time I have discovered new and better techniques, tools and skills. So when we began to look at starting our TV magazine we knew where to start and had time to try out different things. As I have said I discovered opacity as well as other useful tools.

When we began planning for our TV magazine we had quite a few ideas just from looking at the other original magazines. We started by sketching out different ideas that we both had. We also spent time practising on Photoshop. My partner and I both came up with approximately 5 different ideas using different colour schemes, fonts, pictures and styles. This was so that we could have a range of different ideas that we could pick and choose what we used for the final product.

The process of filming started off very simple but due to the fact that it wasn’t winter we did find certain things very difficult to get right for setting the scene, especially factors such as light. As you can see from our blog we did have lots of footage but when we came to editing it there was a problem in that the footage wasn’t of very good quality, this meant that we had to reschedule another time with the actors to shoot it again. The second time round everything went smoothly in that we had a better camera, better weather condition (winter, dark) and that we could also make some of our shoots in the snow as the weather was perfect. When editing our footage we found that we needed little extra bits to help make it look like a realistic trailer such as shots in a local pub and shots of the area that it’s set in (the valley). We choose to have a stereotypical song playing in the background for the trailer and we chose “winter wonderland – Doris Day”. We looked at what music is used in other trailers represented and we felt that our music choice was good as, in soaps the music is always representing what happens, underpins the emotions. Most people relates Christmas to a happy time, almost a perfect Christmas, which is what the song represents but as the trailer goes on and the music begins to fade you realise that this couples Christmas wont be so happy. To match the theme of Christmas we had to look at all angles of the mis-en-scene and the season became and advantage to us as it was snowing and was the weather to create the mis-en-scene needed for our trailer to look realistic.Once all our footage had been edited together and the sound track was added all we needed then was to have the BBC logo at the end like any trailer would have and to have the voice over. We had several ideas for a voice over as you can see on the blog and we choose some one that had a very deep voice to help give the effect of a real trailer. We choose to use BBC one because it is the only channel that is independent and gets paid to put on certain types of programmes, our trailer for the soap would have fitted into that criteria due to the fact that it entertains and informs and the audience.

The TV magazine was very simple to finish as we had all the ideas we just needed to choose the best bits, we choose 5 of the covers out of 10 for a group of people to choose from. We asked several different people what they thought of each of the covers, asking them about factors such as colours, the whole Christmas theme as well as simple things such as font and the pictures. We put all them together in a little summary of results and this gave us a basis for the final piece. We looked at what everyone had said put all their ideas and views together to create the TV magazine we have on the blog.

The Billboard was a small part of the whole project but began being the hardest part due to the fact that in the brief it had written that it had to be a poster, we searched and searched for examples of soap opera posters but we couldn’t find any, this is when we changed it to being a billboard like you would see on the side of the road. We used one of our voice over slogans and the logo that we put at the end of the trailer to create a very simple but good piece. We also used one of our pictures that we took for our TV magazine and used that on the billboard as well, using Photoshop we were able to create our finished project that is on our blog also. Using the theme of Christmas we were able to create synergy across the three of our texts, this is all shown on the blog.