Audience Feedback

Responses

"It's short and quick and the character's are introduced clearly so you know what is happening".
"The crop offers an origanal part to the trailer".
"Set's up enigma's"
"The king and joker cards clear up the roles of the characters".
"The pace fits the music".
"The woman glancing was quite slow".

Progress

This past week we began to make a rough cut of our film. We first got rid of all the footage that we did not need and then we began to put the video footage in the order according to our earlier storyboard and we hope that by the end of this week the rough cut of our trailer will be complete. While we have been editing our film we have also made a start in making the first of our ancillary task,the four posters. The idea behind them, is to have three posters of the characters, individual on thier own and then a billboard poster of all the characters together. Towards the end of this week we will be creating our next ancillary task, the magazine cover, as well as continuing with the editing of our video.

James

19/01/10

We have finished our first ancillary task which consists of the billboard poster (shot of all three characters) and the individual posters. I first began to create the billboard poster in InDesign, where I created a black back ground and placed the individual images of the characters onto the page, having cut them out of their original backgrounds on Photoshop. However, after printing them, I noticed a black box around the images which did not intergrate with the black background. Due to this, we had to transfer our final design to photoshop and then further we had to create all our other posters in Photoshop straight away without the use of InDesign at all. We desaturated all our images to keep the consistency and flow of the campaign and kept our colour palette to 3 colours, black,white and red for effect. We used the same font as we did for our "Challenge Way" logo, Gloucester MT to keep a coherent feel to our production.

Hannah

25.1.10

We have almost finished our second anciallry task which is to create the front cover of a TV listings or soap magazine. We chose to create our front cover of a soap magazine purely through the inspiration of TV Choice magazine which is a very popular and well recongised soap opera magazine. We have used the close up images of ourselves which we took on the same day we filmed our production, as these are more likely to be on the front cover of a magazine to attract the readers attention. We created the front cover in InDesign as it allows us to layout the various elements of the magazine correctly and proffesionally. We edited all our images in photoshop as some of them needed their hue and saturation reducing.

Hannah

26.1.10

We have almost completed both our magzine cover ancillary task and editing our video we have decided to make some final changes to our video.We had to erase some small problems with our video on was that the first scene was turning black and white at the end which we did not want so we did it again so now only the scene after it is black and white.We have also fixed a scene in which robs character is flicking a chip but the scene restarted at the end so Rob deleted the end of the scene to get rid of the problem.

James

26.1.10

We have finally completed our magazine ancillary task. I feel that the final outcome looks really good and traditionally like other soap magazines that are already available to buy on the shelves today, which was what we were trying to achieve. The image we were trying to create for our magazine, was cheesy, bold and bright,stereotypical and not look like a high end, classy magazine with the contrasting colours and the corny vector shapes. Before creating our magazine, we primarily created it with a particular target audience in mind. Looking at our final outcome, we feel successful in our target audience, aiming it at middle aged women.

02.02.10

Today we have decided to upload our video on youtube in order to gain further feedback from a much broader audience hopefully drawing in a response from our target audience. The final edit has been colour graded so that we have achieved our film look that the majority of soap advertisements have. The image is much darker than the original filming and hence the atmosphere is more like a real life poker game. I have also edited the music choice so that the instrumental part emphasizing the electric guitar is involved making the final product more powerful. I have also added more of defragmentation effect so that the black and white scenes make the scene more classic and stylish. As a group we decided to remove the logo from the final cut as it was too bright and friendly and the advertisement does not support this concept. Instead I opted to use the same text as the poster over a black screen that fits in with the whole darkness of the video. I also decided to put in some cross cutting (the cut of James and myself/ James and Hannah) so that the audience can feel like there is some intensity between the characters. To conclude this post I feel that the editing process was extremely lengthy but the final cut has delivered the image that we were aiming for.

Rob

Music Choice 2

NOSTALJA - Greenhaus (Presented by DJ Zorro)

This Album will contain Original Works, Traditional Ballads, and Popular tunes, from the 1960's era of the Golden Years of Classic R&B, Rock&Roll music, Licensed by the original artists or copyright expired.

Proposed Release Date 7th April 200

I found this track listed on the creative commons website Jamendo and instantly recognized it to be from the gangster film Casino (1995). The piece, although extremely dark, is powerful and atmospheric creating a criminal hostile atmosphere, this was what we were hoping to achieve from our media product. Currently we believe this piece is the one we will use for the main product, as it is recognizable and fits our mood perfectly.

Music Choice one

This is our first choice musical piece that we have chosen to possibly use as the non-digetic soundtrack to our soap trailer. This song is performed by the Blues/Jazz musician Oscar Brent, a songwriter and performer from belgium. The track is dark and edgy, very much like the brand image of our soap. Brent's voice is deep and haunting, very much like the johnny Cash voice in the 'judgement day for max' soap trailer for Eastenders. (Below)

Logo (Brand Image)

Above is our soaps logo which was inspired by the Eastenders logo. We decided on this design as it clearly shows location of our soap just as the Eastenders one does. The image was shot at the top of Shear Brow, Blackburn by Rob and James. It is an extreme long shot from a slightly high angle as it was shot at the top of a hill, this shows clear location and consists of a wide range of areas in the location. The image has a slight greyscale effect, which enable 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 of the soap. The font that we chose, was selected for being bold, eye catching and complimenting our image effectively. We feel that eventually, it will be the font that will become recognised as the logo that people will associate the soap with.

Animatic story board

Above, is an animatic display of our storyboard for our T.V trailer. It lists the general idea of the shots we will be using however we were planning on using a few more close ups (e.g. whiskey glass close up and chip throw close up).

The animatic is performed a little faster than we are expecting our actual trailer to be, we are including more slow pace shots and slow motion editing in our final shoot to create a truly cinematic effect which many soap trailers have.

I feel that this storyboard is well articulated as it clearly states the type of shot we are hoping to achieve, although the first slide do move a little to quickly.

Representation

Our TV trailer consists of three main characters, two protagonists and one secondary character.

The two protagonists are going to be created as stereotypes.

"stereotypes are a typical or mass produced images, repeated so may times, it seems to have an established pattern. It is a simplified and highly judgmental type of representation"

Stewart, Lavelle and Kowaltzke

With stereotyping, the process of selection is excessive. Certain aspects are focused on and then exaggerated. At the same time an evaluation is made and the audience is invited to make a judgment. Repetition establishes stereotypes and over time allows them to appear "natural"

Walter Lippman, defined four main functions of stereotyping:

-an ordering process

-a short cut

-an expression of our values and beliefs

-a map of the world

It is important for us to create stereotypes in our TV trailer, as they will allow quick recognition for the audience in such a small space of time, they will allow the audience to relate and quickly understand the content of the trailer by understanding the characters and their personality without even watching an episode and getting to know the character and it will also be useful for us to convey lots of information quickly.

Our soap opera/trailer will include three main characters. The ganster, the woman and the love interest. The gangster will be played by myself, the woman by Hannah and the love interest by James. Obviously due to all the characters being different, they will all be represented in different ways to enable the audience to understand the different roles that are being played. The female protagonist will be portrayed as being innocent, elegant but also made obvious that she is hiding her secret. Scenes with the woman, will be brightly lit up and perhaps side lighting will also be used, to establish the double life she is leading.

The gangster character will be filmed in the dark will low lighting to show his character as being dark and myserious. His character will be played confidently and slyly. He will be dressed in a black suit to give him the gangster representation.

The love interest will be shot in high lighting to show his character as vulnerable and the 'nice guy' who has innocently fallen in love with the woman. His character will be played almost confidently to reassure himself he will end up with the female and he will wear a white suit to give him the good, innocent representation of his character.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to our blog!

Our group consists of Hannah, Rob and James and we have chosen to produce a TV/Soap promotion.

We are intended to create a promotion package for a new soap opera which is to include:

-a TV trailer

with two of the following...

-a listing magazine

-two hyperlinked websites (with a video extract) for the soaps website

-a poster for the soap

We have chosen to create the listings magazine and the poster to promote the soap.