Hannah Gilrane's Evaluation

Introduction
For my project, I was to create a TV soap trailer with two ancillary tasks to go along side the production. For these, I chose to create a poster and a front cover of a soap or TV listings magazine. For my project, I worked with two other members of my media group, Rob Maclean and James Laraway. My particular contributions to the projects were mainly to create the ancillary tasks, which I started to work on straight after our filming, which I was also a part of. I researched soap magazines in detail to be aware of the typical conventions, the structure, layout; designs etc of the magazines and then created our own TV listings magazine. I selected the relevant photographs, all close up shots in particular, as from my research I discovered these are traditional on magazine front covers as opposed to distant photographs. I then cut them out using Photoshop, to ensure they would look professional and then by selecting the colours carefully, and the layout my magazine should follow, was successful in my aim to create the front cover of a soap magazine that follows the conventions of traditional TV listings magazines which therefore allows the audience to be understanding of the genre. Our main target audience for the TV trailer using the demographic profiling of GRASS is mainly females, of any race, ages between 16-35 year olds. It will attract an audience around c1/c2 on the socio-economic scale and according to Young and Rubicans cross cultural consumer characteristics would be aimed at the mainstream audience, because our product is soap trailer and soaps are well known brand names and mainstream audiences tend to buy these brand names. Our product will appeal to this audience as from our research we carried out before deciding on our target audience, confirmed that it is mainly woman aged between 16-35 on average that tend to watch soap operas. Also, Abercrombie (1996:51) argues that “the soap world is a woman's world; dominated by the domestic scenes, the emotions and feelings of strong female characters with a strong sympathy for these feelings and problems. Men, it seems, are excluded from watching these programmes by their very nature.” This quote also suggested to us that our product would be more successful in being aimed at our specified target audience of women

Question One-Genre.
The genre of our project is a TV trailer for a soap opera. When creating our project, we made sure that we were aware of what particular elements we needed to follow to make the genre of our production clear to our audience. Following our research, it was clear to us that TV trailers do not follow the typical, expected conventions of soap operas themselves. Although Soap operas all follow typical conventions that enable the programme to be recognised clearly by audiences, the TV trailers that are used to promote a particular storyline in the programme often break the conventions that soap operas are usually confined and follow more of a film trailer format.

This trailer for Eastenders, was a perfect way to demonstrate that TV trailers do not follow the conventions that soap operas are usually confined. This trailer, follows more of a film trailer format. Some examples of typical elements that soap operas use are stereotypes, multi-stranded narratives, cliff hangers, time, realism of costumes and locations, important social issues are addressed and there are usually typical communal meeting places.

 Although it was important for us to understand the generic conventions of soap operas, we still had to follow particularly for inspiration, and to make sure our final production was typical of this kind of product, the genre of film trailers. It was very important for us to clearly understand the genre of our production, so that audiences would be able to recognise and feel familiar with our product. Graeme Burton stated, “Genres are created through repetition and recognition leading to anticipation and expectation” (2000) this quote enables us to focus fully on making sure that the genre of our production focused on fulfilling our audiences expectations and following typical elements of the genre and repeating conventions so that the audience feel familiar with the product and that we do not frighten them away.

When creating our trailer, we understood it was vital to include the typical conventions that TV trailers include, but also to involve something different and something audiences are not used to seeing. Looking back at our audience feedback, our choices to add new and different elements, worked really effectively for our audience. They clearly took note of the different elements that we included that other soap trailers have not. For example, the split screen effect, showing both characters at the same time to help establish the storyline clearly, the rewinding of shots which we included for added interest and effect and the use of black and white shots incorporated into the coloured ones, along with the whole theme of the trailer being a poker scene, something that no other soap has considered creating. Eventually, our trailer became a hybrid, having more than one genre, the soap genre and also the gangster genre.

This poker scene from Lock, stock and two smoking barrels, really inspired us to create something different to promote our soap. We were inspired by the shots and use of colour grading. We included similar shots to make our audience clear of the genre that we were promoting.

I think our innovations were likely to prove successful as audiences are always keen to see something new and so for this reason, the new, different elements, which we added to our production, gave the audience something unique which was successful in grabbing their attention and having the strong impact in them wanting to see the trailer over and over again.

However we also understood that we couldn’t create our TV trailer too different from the conventional trailers as our audiences would reject it as it would not fulfill their expectations. To enable our audiences to feel familiar with our trailer, we did not include any speech, but instead music, which is typical of TV trailers. The music we selected, for our trailer, reflected more of the gangster genre with the old, dark and husky sound that it had to it. I feel that the selection of music went really well with the content of the trailer and the genre, enabling audiences to feel comfortable and be fulfiled of their expectations. I also understood for the creation of the ancillary tasks that it was as important to consider the genre, and the typical conventions of posters to TV listings magazines as the actual trailer, to understand and be aware of how they are typical of the product and how they differ from other magazines and advertisements. I did lots of research into posters for TV programmes and front cover designs of TV listings magazines.

When researching posters that advertise TV programmes, I discovered that they were able to convey a simple message of what the programme is about just by the shot of characters, facial expressions, body language etc and also the choice of colours used. For the magazine, I found various TV listings magazines which we were possible inspirations for our own production. We decided to create our magazine particularly like TV Choice, which is cheesy and very typical looking of the genre. We made sure that all three productions for our overall project had a particular relationship between each one, which formed a close campaign in the promotion of our fictional soap 'Challenge Way.'

Question Two- Branding and Brand Image.

Creating a brand image for our soap is one of the main elements we needed to focus on. "Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age-within a context of manufactured sameness, image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product" Naomi Klein, No logo. For this reason, we understood that branding is very important to the TV industry. The design of our logo, the genre and choice of institution, all needed to be a brand of our soap and trailer. It was important to have a familiar, recognisable image that our audience could associate the product with time and time again. It enabled there to be a sense of relation between the audience and the product. The use of our logo, slogan, and choice of institution all created a brand image for our product which, "provides customers with a consistent, compelling experience in order not to confuse them as confusion can lead to doubt." mudvalley.com. The brand image for our product is a hard-hitting, realistic, gritty soap opera. Our brand image was mainly inspired by Eastenders as this soap operas brand image is similar to the brand image we were trying to achieve.

Eastenders and its logo in particular, connotates city life, controversy, crime and ‘underground’ secrets, which we found related to our production really well and the aimed brand image we were focusing on, as opposed to other soap opera brand images such as Coronation Street or Emmerdale with more of a traditional, old fashioned, friendly and in some respects less uncontroversial image. We made sure that all three parts of our project, would promote and push our brand image of our soap being a gritty,city-like, hard-hitting image and one of the most important elements that enables a brand image to be pushed, is a logo. Our logo was deeply inspired again by Eastenders as the whole design of the Eastenders logo, represents and pushes the brand image strongly, something we were determined to achieve.

The Eastenders logo was great inspiration for our logo as it represents the brand image that we wished to create. It connotates a gritty, realistic, down to earth image due to the dull colours, choice of font and the location that the logo is of.

The logo for our production is a photograph of a local area, Shear Brow, which clearly displays the location our soap opera, takes place. The image has a slight grayscale effect, which enables it to look gritty and dark, connotating the gangster, sly, hard hitting, realistic feel to it, therefore contributing to the creation of the brand image. The photograph includes a newly built bridge in the area called ‘ challenge way' which is what gave us our soap operas name. We included this name onto our logo design in a font we selected for being bold, eye catching and complementing our image. We feel that eventually, it will be the font that will become recognised as the logo that people will associate the soap opera with.

Our Logo which was inspired by the Eastenders logo.

Throughout all our products, we were successful in maintaining our brand image. The success of our brand image came from focusing on three things; having a consistent font and colour for our logo which has the right connotations for our brand, a consistent brand image with the image of a gritty, real life, exciting soap and finally, a consistent theme and campaign of the love triangle storyline. The production of our TV trailer was clear in the brand image we were trying to create, due to various elements; the colours we used in editing, for example the black and white effect we included to give our trailer a gritty, gangster, hard hitting look and feel, reassuring our audience of our brand image. The way the characters performed in the production, the facial expressions, body language, costumes etc, the colours we chose for our poster ancillary task, black background to connotate the characters and the storyline, being secretive and in some respects dangerous, the red font we incorporated with the white font to add detail and emphasis on certain, important words. The way in which I edited the photographs of the characters, by desaturating them so that they related well with the colours of the actual poster and finally the logo of the BBC, our chosen institution, to enable the audience to be aware of which programme our product was created for along with our own ‘challenge way’ logo which clearly works well with the poster to achieve success in our brand image aim. For the other ancillary task of the TV listings magazine, I had to work extra hard in making sure that the bright, cheesy, traditional colours of the TV choice magazine and the eye-catching layout, did not result in our brand image being confusing for our audience. For this reason, I made sure that the storyline was clear by positioning the characters in suitable places so that hopefully the audience would understand the type of soap it is. The characters costumes are the same on the magazine as they are on the poster and in the TV trailer, which will hopefully allow the audience to recognise this and therefore keep our brand image clear in the form of an advertising campaign for all our products.





All the promotional posters for our soap, push and promote the brand image, following a gangster theme. This is made clear through the choice of colours, and the characters costumes. It is clear from the posters, that our film pushes a gritty, hard-hitting, sly brand image that we aimed to create and because of this, I feel confident that the audience will become familiar with the branding of our soap and be able to recognise and assosiate our logo, posters and insitution with 'Challenge Way', repetition and recognition leads to expectation and anticipation”(G.Burton, 2000)

We created our product based on inspiration from Eastenders, which is a very popular soap on BBC1. For this reason we created our TV trailer for the BBC institution. The BBC might distribute our media product, as we created a brand image for our soap that would most fit into the BBC institution well with it being of the BBC’s audiences expectations. The BBC is the perfect institution for our media product, as most programmes that the BBC distributes are dramas or programmes including soap operas e.g. Eastenders, that deal with controversial, realistic and topical issues. We considered ITV to distribute our production, mainly due to the inspirational TV trailer for Emmerdale which involves a format similar to ours. However after considering the brand image of our soap we decided it would be more likely to fit the BBC’s image and reputation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/eastenders/

We also used the conventions of the ganster film genre to add to the brand image. The storyline being the love triangle and the characters in the storyline which include a gangster and his girlfriend, the mise en scene of the characters costumes, the black and white suits for example which push the character and what types of people this allows them to resemble. Also the black and white editing which creates a dark, mysterious, secretive feel to the trailer, all of which relates to the gangsters character and what people assosiate this type of character with. The gangster theme which we created in our trailer adds to the the brand image of our soap in that it is  realistic, gritty and hard-hitting which is all pushed through the inpiration of the 'gangster film' genre. This particular genre enabled our soap to be a hybrid, in that it includes more than one genre. This allowed us to offer something new to our audience. The inspiration for the gangster genre in our soap, came from the poker scene in lock, stock and two smoking barrels which includes a gangster character. This inspired us to not only consider the typical trailer genre and its conventions, or a trailer for a film, but also a specific theme in a film which allowed us in our final trailer to show hybridiity and push our brand image.

Question Three- Audience.

We needed our product to have an audience for our institution to target so we could construct our product to appeal to our particular chosen target audience. Our product, using the demographic profiling of GRASS is for females of any race aged between 16 and 35 years. The socio-economic status is groups C1 and C2, lower middle class and skilled working class. We chose females, as the plot of the our soap is a love triangle and so relating this to the Abercrombie (1996:51) quote, “the soap world is a woman's world; dominated by the domestic scenes, the emotions and feelings of strong female characters with a strong sympathy for these feelings and problems. Men, it seems, are excluded from watching these programmes by their very nature,” we decided that our product would be more successful in being aimed at our specified target audience of women. Any race would enjoy our product as people of any race or culture could relate to the issue or situation we chose to deal with in our trailer. We targeted our soap at women of ages between 16 and 35 as it is a fairly close age range that would be most likely to watch the type of soap that we have created, the brand image of real life, controversial issues which women in our chosen age range could most likely relate too. Our socio-economic status group was decided on due to the brand image of the soap and the types of stereotypical characters that would be included. Lower middle class and skilled working class people would perhaps be able to relate to our soap more than perhaps A OR B which are the upper and middle class. We also focused on a wider, secondary target audience to appeal to a wider audience, using again the GRASS demographic profiling system. Our media product was also trying to attract both genders because the plot of the trailer would attract males and females, e.g., the love triangle for females and the gangster theme for the males. Again, the soap is not aimed at any race as the situation could relate to anyone of any race. The main age range for our trailer, is 16-35, however we are not aiming to limit our soap to this age range, the older generation would also appreciate it because they most probably grew up with gangster films like the Godfather so the gangster theme in the trailer would appeal to them also. By using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I am able to show the basic human needs our text fulfills and therefore why it appeals to our audience. On the scale, our product represents love and belonging and is why our target audience would be interested in it. The reason our trailer represents love and belonging, is because the plot is a love triangle with a good, innocent character and a gangster figure so the audience will want to watch the soap to see what happens and hopefully the woman will fall for the good character. Blumer and Mcquails theory of uses and gratifications also shows what basic human needs our media text is going to fulfill.

We attracted our audience using the ‘uses and gratifications theory.’ This theory counters the views that audiences are easily brainwashed, but actively consume the media to gratify their needs; people are capable of making their own minds up, accept some media messages, reject others and use the media for a variety of reasons at different times. Our trailer represents a storyline that many people often see in the media, particularly in soaps, which audiences can usually relate to and accept in society today. Blumler, McQuail and Brown have identified four major categories of which the media serve to gratify. Our trailer focuses on the Personal Relationships category, which is media texts that look at companionship via personalities and characters. The storyline that our trailer focuses on enables our audience to feel a sense of relationship between themselves and the characters. For example, women may feel themselves being in the same situation as the woman character in our trailer, being stuck between two men. Our trailer allows them to feel a connection with the character and help with their own situation.When advertising and marketing the product to our audience, I used AIDA, an acronym used in marketing that describes a common list of events that are very often undergone when a person or company is selling a product or service. We attracted attention to our product mainly through the creation of the ancillary tasks. The posters which we created for bus stops and billboards are mass promotional materials that allow the audience to be aware of the soap and using the colours, photographs and choice of slogan together with the selected font, attract the audience to watch the soap. The interest of our product was created through the different design that our posters offered. The black, white and red choices of colour gripped the interest of the audience as it is something they are not used to seeing and therefore made them focus on what the poster was promoting. We created the desire for our soap by focusing on a real life situation that is present in society today. The storyline that was created and then pushed, created a service that would satisfy our audiences need to see what happens in this type of situation and also the satisfaction that people in society who are experiencing what our product is pushing, would feel when having their problem dealt with in a media text. The action we wished for our audience to take, was to watch the soap, which we promoted well with the creation on our ancillary tasks, posters, magazine front cover and main production, the TV trailer all lead the audience to be interested in our product and pushed them to watch the soap.

Before deciding on our target audience, we carried out audience research to see which gender most watches soaps, what age range is most popular, which channel is most popular, whether or not audiences watch TV adverts, whether they are influenced to watch the soaps by the adverts and what type of storyline they most prefer. From our audience feedback, we found that the most popular aged range was between 25 and 40 and the most popular soap was Eastenders which is the soap that was inspiration for our product. I created numerous charts in Microsoft Excel to enable me to clearly see the results easily and therefore allow me to decide which audience range would be best for our soap to target.

Once we had completed our actual product, we showed it to 15 people as part of audience testing and gathered feedback of our media product to see which parts worked well and elements of the trailer which we could have improved on. Numerous people said that it was very typical of a soap trailer due to the build up of enigmas, which was something we aimed for. They also stated that the characters were clearly represented and the stereotypical representations worked well together with the theme of the trailer. Some elements that people suggested could be improved on were the pacing of the trailer with some parts being made faster than others and also less black and white shots, to establish the colour of the characters costumes which could be used as a way or representing the characters. E.g the black suit for the gangster to connotate his dark, mysterious, sly character and the white suit for the love interest to show his innocent, culnerbale character. Reflecting back on this feedback, I would take into consideration what elements our audience has suggested we change. I would maybe take out some of the black and white shots as although they go with the posters to form a campaign, there are more black and white shots than coloured ones, which takes out the representation of the characters with the audience being unaware of detailed elements such as the colour of the suits to separate the gangster from the innocent guy. I would also speed up some of the relevant shots to give the trailer more detail and make some actions of the characters look more realistic. Other than these minor things, our audience feedback was good with numerous people stating that it followed all the typical conventions of a TV trailer and created enigmas which was what we initially aimed to achieve and that they would not improve anything. I would only make slight changes to our product to make it better.

Question four-Use of creative technologies

Throughout the entire project and production of our TV trailer, I used a number of media technologies to ensure that everything was created to the best that it could be. To begin with, we created a blog that would hold all our research, development stages and final products on blogger. This was a very simple and easy website to use and once we had set up our actual blog, blogging posts throughout the project was straightforward. There were many advantages of using blogger for example, I could go back and edit posts whenever I felt relevant, I could add videos, images and web links to the posts and it was also very easy and convenient to view particular posts without scrolling through the entire blog. However I also experienced some disadvantages that blogger created, for example on occasions, uploading images took a long time which slowed down all the other posting I had to do. There was also the problem of not being able to rearrange posts in an order we felt appropriate which was some times difficult if we had forgotten a certain post etc. The next part of my coursework involved me carrying out lots of research and so for this, I primarily used the internet. This software was very reliable and I managed to find all the relevant information that I needed through the search engine Google. I used Google to look at soap opera websites to decide on our institution and how we would create a relevant brand image to co inside with our soap. Another important source that I use a lot throughout the research and development stages of production was YouTube. I used this website, to research the format of TV trailers that already exists to see what elements we needed to include in our own trailer. The advantages of this website, was that it enabled me to view TV trailers from any channel, time period or programme at my convenience. It was very easy to look at existing trailers all in the same place without having to research hundreds of different websites. Another advantage was the easiness of importing the videos to blogger by just selecting and copying the embedded link into the relevant posts. These websites were very easy to look at and find all the information I needed. The advantage of using the internet for researching information was that it was always available whenever I needed to use it. It was a very convenient source to use and also reliable as it did contain all the information that I needed in order to carry out all the research needed to ensure our project was a success. I would not say that I experienced any disadvantages of using the internet and I would definitely use the internet again to gather information. Once I had gathered all the information and research needed, it was then production time and in creating our actual TV trailer, we used lots of physical technology. The DV (digital video) cameras were our main source for filming our trailer. These cameras had many advantages such as having the ability to be hand held to create hand held shots, panning shots and quick pan shots. This was particularly good as our trailer included all these shots. Another, that it could be placed on a tripod for the shots that needed to be still and steady such as the close up shots and the high and low angle shots of the characters. However the camera did also have some disadvantages, for example on some of the high angled shots, although the camera was on a tripod, it was difficult to capture some still shots without the camera shaking a little. Apart from this disadvantage, the DV camera was very easy to use and was of a good quality.

We also used digital stills cameras, to take photographs of the characters for our posters and magazine front cover and the props we used as part of the planning stage. We used these stills to also take photographs of our props in the research and development stage of the production. Advantages of the digital cameras were that they were very straightforward and uncomplicated to manage and were convenient and quick to use, also that you could view the photographs once taken on the screen at the back of the camera, which allowed us to see if the images were decent or not. However I also came across some disadvantages of using the digital stills cameras, for example some of the photographs were shadowed or reflected light from the lighting and so we had to adjust lighting to get a good photo which at times was rather inconvenient. It was also a disadvantage that some of the images were blurry due to the instability we had when capturing the photo.

Once we had shot our trailer, the biggest part of the final production, was to advance edit the footage in software called Final Cut Express which is a non linear video editing application created by Apple. We firstly did a rough cut which involved us getting rid of the all the footage that we were certain we did not want using the erase tool. Once we had done this, we then made sure all the shots were in the right order so that the trailer obviously made sense. Once all the important elements were complete, the cutting and rearranging of shots, we then edited the trailer as a whole by adding transitions so that the changing of shots to shots was done smoothly and looked professional. We also used the colour grading tool on the colour corrector video filters menu, to give the main footage a professional and typical look of a TV trailer. We toned down the hue and saturation so that the yellow tones were reduced. We also changed the brightness and contrast of the black and white shots to add to the dark, gangster look and feel of the trailer. We also added a track which we found on the creative commons website, called house of the rising sun by Nostalja. The advantages of using this software were that it is a package that professionals use and so it gave us the advantage to give our footage a professional look and was also straight forward to use. The disadvantages of Final Cut Express are that it took time to get used to everything which at first took time, there was lots of different parts that I needed to become familiar with as there are many components that are involved in editing a good piece of footage. Another problem with this software, which gave our final trailer a disadvantage, which some members of our audience picked up on looking at the feedback, was the fault in uploading our soundtrack. Firstly the soundtrack was fine and was of good quality, but when showing our final trailer to the audience, we noticed that the soundtrack was jumping slightly, which we had no control over and put down to the software. This was the only problem that we faced with Final Cut. When creating our ancillary tasks, I used two of the main adobe software’s, Photoshop and InDesign. I used Photoshop to edit the primary photographs of the characters, by cutting them out of the background using the pen tool, which allowed me to draw around the outline of the character and then cut them from the background. I then desaturated the images for the posters as we wanted them to be black and white as part of the campaign, editing the brightness and contrast too to make them look more defined but was careful not to erase the detail. I also reduced the hue and saturation of the coloured photographs that were used on the magazine front cover, as they had yellow tones which made them look unprofessional. There were many advantages of Photoshop, for example, it was a very easy software to manage with the simple icons easy to access and the pen tool allowed very close cuts of the characters, which left our images perfect for arranging on the magazine front cover and the posters. One disadvantage of Photoshop that I discovered once I had placed the edited photographs onto the IN Design document was that Photoshop had left a discoloured box around the images, despite me having removed all the background from the images. This was a technical problem with Photoshop which could not be resolved personally. Other than this slight disadvantage, Photoshop played a big part in the success of the ancillary tasks and I would definitely use this software in further productions. The other adobe software that I used to create the posters and magazine cover was In Design. It gave me the advantage to lay out the magazine in particular, in a conventional way due to the marks and bleed lines that it offered me, to ensure that everything was professionally inline and positioned correctly. I placed the photographs which I had previously edited in Photoshop and then saved, onto the page and then using the shift key, was able to re-size the images to fit, without them being cropped of loosing detail. I did not experience any disadvantages of this software in the creation of the magazine, however, I did have problems when creating the posters with the black background, due the transition between the Photoshop edit and the placing in InDesign. Overall, the uses of technologies have allowed us as a group and also myself individually, to create a media product to the best of our ability. The internet played a huge role in the research and development of the product due to me being able to look existing trailers, present all of the development, download music, and download images for the magazine. Without the availability of technology in our production, I would have been unable to edit the trailer and in some respects even create it to a high, professional standard and the ancillary tasks would have not looked conventional or been successful products from any of the media technologies, as they all allowed me to do all the elements that wanted them to as part of the brand image campaign. I did not experience any limitations to the creation of the. I would definitely use all the technologies again if I was to re-create the trailer and ancillary tasks.

Overall, reflecting back on the project as a whole, I feel that one particular element we achieved was the success in creating a brand image. We focused fully on the type of brand image we wished for our products to push, the dark,girtty, hard-hitting look and feel to our soap, which related well to the storyline of our soap and trailer and also the ancillary tasks.We then throughout the whole production, aimed to focus on pushing this brand image onto our audience in every aspect of our products.  The logo which I feel is particulaly important when expecting our audience to relate to it as our soap 'Challenge Way' clearly connotates well, the genre and brand image of the overall soap. This allows our audience to feel a sense of familiarity with our soap and therefore enable them to successfully assosiate the logo, posters, magazine front cover and trailer with our soap opera and know it well!

I feel that I contributed to this project 100% and inputed everything to the best of my ability. My strongest points lied in the production of the anciallry tasks which I put most of my time and effort into. I managed my time well and made sure that I was clear of what I needed to do in order for the posters and magazine to be successful.

James Laraways evaluation

Introduction
This is my evaluation of our groups coursework which includes a soap trailer as well as ancillary tasks that were posters and a magazine cover. We seperated the work into three so that i and the other two members of my group Hannah Gilrane and Robert Maclean would all have somthing to contribute to the project. My main contribution was creating the ancillary tasks which i did straight after filming and reaserching both the trailer and the ancillary tasks were i found that soap trailers are very similar to film trailers in that they bring up a lot of enigmas and i found out how we should design our posters and magazine by looking at other soap magazines, as well as this i was apart of the filming process of the trailer both on and off screen. In this evaluation i will be talking about the type of genre that our products represent, the brand of our soap and how we pushed this brand. As well as this I will be evaluating our work seeing what we did well and what we would change to do this I will also take into account some audience feedback we have gathered. As well as this I will talk about what I have learnt by doing this project and what new media technologies I have learnt and used.


Question one: Genre
When reaserching for our soap trailer we realsied that a soap trailer does not follow the conventions of a soap opera. Knowing this we tried to make the trailer seem like a film trailer so we set the trailer to make it look like a poker game with a gangster similar to a scene in the film lock stock and two smoking barrels which shows poker scenes in the trailer.

Soap television trailers are created to advertise a particular storyline that is happening or that is going to happen in a soap. These trailers usually focus on one character that the storyline revolves around.
An example of a soap trailer that represents a soaps storyline in the same way is Corination Streets trailer about Tony (below). This trailer revolves around one character Tony but has the same theme as our trailer in that it is Tonys dark side against his light, the fight between good and evil which is what our trailer is.




Knowing this we devised our TV trailer to do the same, the genre of our soap is a dark gritty northern drama and the storyline we created represents this sort of soap. The trailer coincides with this theme because it is a typical storyline for a soap like ours. The trailer shows the storyline of a love triangle with a dark twist there is one good guy who is dressed in white and a bad guy who is a gangster who is dressed in black to show he is the evil one. The genre of our soap trailer would be apart of the gangster genre with the protagonist being a gangster and the love intrest being his girlfriend. We used the typical conventions of a gangster film in the trailer. The mise-en-scene is a dark room were the characters are playing poker and the woman is dressed up to represent the woman of a gangster this was done by having her dress up in an expensive dress and with expensive jewelry. Another convention of the gangster genre we used was to have a typical scene were the gangster is drinking whisky and on the final shot of the trailer we see him drinking it which is typical of a Hollywood gangster which is the type of character we were trying to show him as. It was important for us to use these typical elements of a gangster in the trailer because the storyline revolves around the protagonist gangster so he needed to be identified as a gangster. To do this we needed to use the typical stereotypes of a gangster like the black suit and the whisky. Although we did need to establish he was the bad guy gangster by using stereotypes we intentionally left out some typical Hollywood stereotypes of a gangster like showing he had a gun or smoking a cigar. The reason we did this was because we did not want him to seem too much of an American gangster and those things are typical of an Italian American gangster. The clip of the Godfather below shows the stereotypes of an italian american gangster who is talking about respect and about putting his family first, we did not want our gangster to be the same we needed him to seem selfish and dangerous and a man who believes that his girlfriend is his property.




Another thing we did different to the typical gangster genre was to not have the gangster up against another gangster rather we had his rival be the nice guy who his girlfriend falls in love with and to show that he was the nice guy we had him dressed in white and have a lot less chips than the gangster showing that he would struggle to compete with him. It was vital to make changes to the typical stereotype of a gangster because it would have been boring because people would look at it and think that they have seen it a hundred times before. We believed that the innovation of having a innocent good guy as the love interest and rival to the gangster would be better than two gangsters or two normal people this is because the audience know who to support and would watch the show to see the good guy succeed or fail in his attempt to win the girl. The audience showed this through there feedback were they said they could easilly recognise who the characters were. So if they could recognise them it would be easy for thge audience to know who to support.

Question 2: Branding and brand image
The brand image of our product is a dark gritty drama similar to the soap Eastenders but it is set in the North. Our logo (logo below)



fits our brand image because it is a picture of Blackburn with challenge way written accross it and Blackburn is a gritty urban northen town so fits with the type of theme we want to portray. We managed to maintain this brand image throughout all our different products. For example the posters (posters below)


(This image above has lines on it this was a fault with the indesign programme which we could not fix so we were unable to fix the problem.)









are of all the characters either together or on their own, on a black background and all the characters look intense showing that it is a dark show. In our magazine cover (below)




we try to maintain the brand image by having the characters looking intense and dressed in black and white showing a dark theme to the soap. We had to do this quite discretely because it was a typical soap magazine tv choice which has its own brand image of being a trashy soap magazine so we could not let it look too dark because it would not have gone with the brand image of the magazine. I believe that the media institution BBC would distribute our media product because it also distributes a similar product in Eastenders so i believe that they would be happy to distribute our product becasue Eastenders has proven to be a success so they would exept the same from our product. We can see that the BBC likes to distribute dark gritty products this is seen in the Eastenders advertisement below. It is the Max eastenders trailer in which it talks about his death to dark onimous music which gives the theme of a man on his walk to the gallows so obviously there is a dark theme to the storyline which our trailer also has.

Branding is very important in promoting a product as it helps give the product a reputation and build a relationship between the brand and the product. It was important to us to have a recognisable image that our audience and even people who dont watch our soap will be able to recognise. To be able for our product to be this recognisable we decided to create a brand image for our product that was similar to another very recognisable soap Eastenders. We made our brand image similar to Eastenders by making our product dark, gritty and realistic. Our trailer, posters and magazine cover all portary the image of a dark gritty drama by the characters looking intense and being in black and white through part of the film and on the posters. 

The Eastenders logo (below) is a simple birds eye view of the east end of London the connotations of this is crime, working class and controvasy which is the type of brand image that we are trying to show. We therfore created a similar logo which is an overview of Blackburn with the title of our soap, challenge way across it in a similar way to the Eastenders logo. Like the Eastenders logo our logo gives connatations that are similar to the east end of London because they are similar to Blackburn which is why we chose to set our soap in Blackburn becasue it gives the dark urban theme that the east end of London does for Eastenders.

Question 3: Audience

The outline of the audience that we are aiming our product at is explained through grass.

G – We are mainly aiming for a female audience

R – We are not really aiming for any specific race there is nothing that any races will find offensive.

A – Age range is between 16 – 35

S – c1/c2 on the socio economic scale

According to Young and Rubicams cross cultural consumer characteristics our target audience is the mainstream audience. This is a very good audience to target because the mainstream audience is the largest mass audience so if the mainstream likes it then it will be a success. The mainstream audience is just normal people with normal lives and that is what our soap revolves around, it is a dark gritty drama that throws up a lot of enigmas so will appeal to the mainstream. The socio-economic status is groups c1 and c2 which is the lower middle class and working class. We chose a female audience because that is who mainly watch soaps as well as this our storyline is a love traingle which is one that women would relate to more than men. However the characters in the storyline like the gangster and the theme of good versus evil would also entice men into watching it. Niehter the storyline or the plot is aimed at any specific race or is aimed to exclude any race the plot is somthing anyone can relate togood versus evil and a story of love. Our age range is between 16 and 35 we have aimed for this audience becasue the brand image of our soap is a gritty and real life soap drama so people between the ages of 16 and 35 will be able to relate to it easilly. The reason that we have aimed for the c1/c2 groups on the socio-economic scale is because that is what our soap revolves around working class people struggling with everyday life and therfore this audience would be able to relate to it because they would recognise the same trails and tribulations that they go through. Even though we do have a specific age range of 16-35 for our trailer the gangtser elemelnt of our trailer will be liked by the older generation who grew up watching gangster films like the Godfather films and Goodfellas. I am able to show the basic human needs that our product fulfils by using Maslows hierarchy of needs theory. Our product represents love and belonging it does this becasue it is a love triangle with a good and innocent cahracter versus an evil gangster. The audience will watch the soap because they will want to root for the good guy and hope that she will pick him rather than the gangster.
Our trailer focuses on the personal relationship catagory from Bulmer, McQuail and and Browns four catagories the stroyline of our trailer lets our audience feel a relationship between them and the characters for instance women may have been in the same situation either stuck between two men or a man who is abusive. To get the attention of our audinces we used our ancillary products to advertise the soap and the storyline. The posters are meant for bus shelters and billboards and the colors that we have chosen along with the photographs, slogan and chice of font is meant to push the brand image and to attract our target audience and to represent the type of storyline we are portraying.
Proior to decieding on our target audience we decided to do some audience reaserch, this was asking questions to all different types of people to see who would be our best target audience. The information we were looking for was gender, age, favourite storylines, if they watch adverts and if they are influenced to watch television programmes by adverts. This powerpoint shows the results from our audience feedback prior to creating our video.

Feedback From Audience

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We used both indesign and photoshop in making the magazine cover which was effective because we used a typical soap magazine that the mainstream audience reads tv choice, so the mainstream now understand what our soap is about and they will be attracted to watch it. We created our products with our audience in mind in that the products are centered around the theme of good versus evil and that is clearly represented in our products were the villain is dressed in black while the hero is in white. The reason this is important to our audience is because the mainstream audience is a typical Hollywood audience were they always root for the hero so the theme of good versus evil would appeal to them.

After we completed our product and ancillary tasks we showed the trailer to fifteen people to gather feedback and see what went down well and what we could have improved on. The majority of people said that they thought it was a good soap trailer becasue it through up a lot of enigmas. They also thought that the characters were clearly represented through stereotypes, especially the gangster. The audience thought that it could have been improved by less black and white shots so it could clearly represent the colors of the characters costumes and therfore established the characters more clearly. After getting this feedback i would make some small changes to the video but i would only make some slight changes to it like showing the love intrests costume in color more because i think the colors of the other two characters do not need to be changed because they are dressed in black and white so that shows up in black and white shots anyway. Overall our audience feedback was good with some minor concerns that could have been easilly ratified if we did the project again.
Example audience feedback sheets...

Question 4: Use of Creative technologies – skills you have learned

We used many different technologies in the construction of our main products. The video camera that we used to film our video was the first time that I had used a video camera in a project like this. Although I had never used a camera like this one before I went through training on how to use them so I was capable of shooting the video. After we filmed our video we had to edit our footage on final cut express and the only member of our group who had any experience on the programme was Rob so I was able to learn anything I needed to off what he told me. I found that final cut express was quite easy to use and there was a lot that could be done on it to improve the video like changing speed and color which was important because a large portion of our video was in black and white. Another programme that I used was InDesign which was used to create our ancillary products. I found using InDesign was very easy because I had already had used it in the previous year, so the creation of the posters and magazines were easier because I had already created something similar in the previous college year. As well as this we used a still camera in order to take images of our character for the ancillary products, take pictures of the props that we used (below)

we also used it to take pictures of our logo challenge way which is an overview of Blackburn. Again I had used this type of camera before in my media product last year so I found it easy to use again.

When doing planning for our product we used a variety of different programmes one of them would be blogger were we planned and wrote down everything that we had done this was very helpful because it allowed us to remember everything that we had done and see what we needed to do next. We also used it in the reaserch part of our product by going on the internet and finding images of different soap magazines and putting them on blogger. This helped us because we could now see what the design of our posters and magazine should look like. As well as this we used the video camera again to capture our animatic/storyboard so we could show what our original plan for the video was and see what changes and/or improvements we made to it.

To create our video we used final cut express and in that programme we put everything that we had previously filmed which was one 8 minute, one 3 minute and one 11 minute videos which we had to cut down to one video under 90 seconds. In order to cut the video and keep the parts of the video that we needed we used the razor blade tool which let us cut the video at a certain point so it allowed us to keep whay we needed and disgard what we did not. Using final cut express allowed us to edit the video in different ways by clicking on video transitions we were able to change the way we went from one scene to another the first way we did this was the fade in fade out cut which allowed to fade out of one scene and fade into another. Another benefit to using final cut express was being able to make some of the scenes black and white by pressing desaturate on image control. This allowed us to change our video to black and white in certain scenes this was important in portraying the brand image of not only the soap but the stroyline which was  dark and gritty. As well as this final cut express aloowed us to change the speed and even rewind certain  scenes that we felt needed to be sped up or reversed. An example of us changing the speed and reversing the scene was the coin flip scene were we pressed modify - speed - 50% and reverse which reversed the scene at a slow pace and looked good. There were not many drawbacks to final cut express the main but one of the main ones was it was very complicated and not very clear. The specific words and tools we needed to change the video in certain ways were not very clear and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to edit the video which was time we should have been using to think of ways in which we could have further improved the video.

In creating our ancillary tasks we used both indesign and photoshop this helped me in creating the layout of the magazine and posters as well as allowing me to edit the pictures of the characters. In the programme photoshop i used it to edit the photographs of the main characters i used the pen tool to cut out my pictures from there backgrounds and then i went on to desaturate the images to make them black and white, we did this so that it would go with the brand image of the soap and trailer which is also shot in some black and white shots. In the magazine the images had yellow tones so we needed to reduce the saturation in order to make them look more professional. The advantages of photoshop were it was very clear and simple to use the tools were simple which allowed me cut the images very neatly and clearly. There were some disadvantages the main one being was when we put our images onto indesign it kept a black background that we had removed in photoshop but it still showed up in indesing and when we printed them off, this was a flaw with photoshop which we could not fix as it was a problem with the programme.
 The other main technology that we used in creating our posters and magaine cover was indesign this programme we used a lot and it was very important in creating our magazine cover and posters. The reason that it was important was because it allowed us to create a proffesional looking posters and magazine cover which was important because we based our magazine cover on a real magazine. It also enabled me to take the images from photoshop and edit them even further, i was able to resize the images without loosing the deltail. I did not feel that there were any real problems i thought that it was easy to use and clearly represented in the tools so i was able to create proffesional posters and the magazine cover which stayed with the theme of our brand image.

As well as these programmes i also used different websites in creating my products and doing my reaserch.
The first of these websites was blogger, this was important to us in the reaserch, creating and evaluation of our products. Blogger allowed us to keep track of what we had done and it allowed us to store reaserch on it that we needed in creating our products. The reason that blogger helped us as a group was because it let us put everything we needed in one place, instead of each one of our group having information that another needed it was all easilly accesable in one location. I did not find any real problems with blogger it was easy and simple to use and allowed us to share with each other what we were doing when we were out of lesson.

Another important website that we used was the creative commons website jamendo although we only used it once it was important in creating our product. This website allowed us to select the song that would be on our video and it we were able to get the song for free. The website gave us a good song called house from the rising sun this was a song that not only went with our trailer it also was a song in the gangster film casino so it went with the gangster theme of our trailer.

As well as this we aslo used the search engine  google for our reaserch on posters, magazine covers and soap storylines. Google allowed us to get images of other soaps and see how they were trying to promote a storyline. We also used it in creating the layout of our magazine tv choice we looked up many different magazine covers on google in order to understand how we should lay out our own magzine cover.

Youtube was another website that we used especially in the reaserch part of our project. It allowed us to look at different soap and film trailers to see how they should be done and so this gave us a base in how a soap trailer should look and as we found out soap trailers look more like film trailers. We also put our video on Youtube in order to get some more audience feedback but this did not prove as successful as the audience feedback sheets because we did not get many views or any comments.

Conclusion
 Overall i feel that we were pariculaly effective in creating a strong brand image for our product. We were completely focused on creating a brand image that our products would be able to push and i belive that is what we created. Our trailer, storyline and ancillary tasks all pushed the brand image of a dark gritty soap opera, our focus in all of our products was to display this image. Our logo was particularly important in making our audince relate to our soap the tiltle challenge way and the set of Blackburn clearly connotates well and shows our brand image which is dark and urban. The logo also allows our audience to have a sense of familiarity with our product and therfore they will associate our logo with our different products.
 I belive i have contributed a lot to our project and completed all of my tasks to the best of ability. The things that i felt i was srongest at was both the reaserch and ancillary tasks and therfore that is were i focused most of my attention. I managed my time well and i was able to focus on the task at hand which was neccessary to make the products successful.