Evaluation

In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our media product adheres to the generic conventions of real media products through use of editing, mise-en-scene, camera angles and common storylines/characters. The trailer for ‘Woodberry Town’ has a main establishing setting throughout of a pub, which is generally used as a focal setting for the community of soap operas in British television. Additionally, we have included a sequence of shots that are not part of the soap itself but are parallel to the storyline our trailer focuses on, to give a dramatic, entertaining and engaging presentation of the new soap opera. We employed effects such as higher saturation colour filters and slow motion to give a clear definition between this sequence of shots and the scenes that are actual previews of what will be in Woodberry Town. Furthermore, our trailer hints and foreshadows themes that are regularly addressed in soap operas, universally – love affairs, secrets, family and addiction. Many soap operas adhere to the Propp’s stock characters theory and over time have modernized this theory to provide a representation of reality; we incorporated this concept in our media product with characters such as Scarlett Fisher resembling the conventional soap character of Eastenders’ ‘Kat Moon’, who encapsulates the troubled but feisty female character and Martin Turner who is comparable to Hollyoaks’ ‘Ste Haye’ who plays the easily swayed, yet trying to remain a father figure, male.

Our trailer features very little dialogue but hints throughout to give a vague and intriguing implication of what will happen in the soap, similar to the generic form of many soaps such as Eastenders and Emmerdale. On the other other hand, our use of crosscutting between several upcoming scenes does challenge the form of soap trailers such as those from Eastenders, whereby scenes are created specifically for the trailer and only hint at the themes of the storyline as opposing to giving away any featured scenes of the soap itself. With dramatic lines pinpointing particular drama such as "you can't walk away now", the accompaniment of quick cuts and blackouts between scenes is reminiscent of the weekly trailers that fellow Channel 4 soap, Hollyoaks, releases. The music we used also adheres to the feel of many of the Hollyoaks trailers and the soap itself - Hollyoaks often incorportaes modern music that is unattached to their soap as a brand but is reflective of the young, modern life that it promotes, portrays and targets. With our soap being broadcasted by Channel 4 who - with an ethos of presenting modern, innovate and diverse products - aim to attract a young audience by showing programmes that this audience can relate to, our use of a modern and edgy soundtrack to our trailer not only encompasses the edgy and current storylines of our soap but also adheres to the want of both Channel 4 and Channel 4 viewers.

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Our main product coincides with our ancillary texts to give a clear and consistent presentation of our soap opera. Our TV listings magazine cover follows the expected conventions of such a magazine cover, for example our use of a cluttered layout with overlays, text-wrapping and images breaking out of boxes and bold sans-serif fonts are similar to those used on all TV listings magazines. However, it still promotes ‘Woodberry Town’ in the same manner and mood of presentation as our poster – reflecting Woodberry Town with a strong image to attract the correct target audience and somewhat ‘brand’ the soap opera to amplify the opportunity for a loyal fan base to be generated. The bold primary colours and shapes used give the same informal mood as most TV listings magazines with an additional colloquial tone through use of slogans such as ‘Who needs Crimbo parties?’ As a genre of magazines that intend to address a variety of audiences spanning all demographics and psychographics, our magazine presents a friend-like, encouraging and relaxed portrayal of the magazine and therefore will not exclude or discourage any person from buying the magazine. The centre image allows the main focus of the magazine to on the characters of Woodberry Town, with the representation of the love triangle being clear enough but still intriguing as the characters are represented with active poses to symbolize each of their personalities. For instance the girl on the right has her arms crossed with a smug, rebellious facial expression to indicate her troublesome character and the girl on the left has her hand on the shoulder of the centre man but the fact that she is standing behind him shows her desire to control him and remind him of her presence. While the magazine mainly uses saturated colours to connote the fun, colloquial and informal register of the magazine’s ‘person’, the Woodberry Town image uses a conventional shot with naturalistic lighting to aid the soap opera genre of being a representation of reality, and to additionally give a non-aspirational but ‘normal’ representation of television and magazines that will not exclude any members of the public therefore stopping them from wanting to buy the magazine and find out about Woodberry Town.

Our poster, on the other hand, is specifically aimed at our target audience with a modern and innovative design that we hope will attract the demographic of ages 15 to 25 years. We have incorporated gritty, dark aspect through use saturated colours but low-key lighting to connote contemporary mystery and rebellion surrounding the characters of Aiden and Scarlett, which our audience research obtained to be appealing to our target audience with their preference of dark storylines. This is then juxtaposed with the right hand side of the poster, presenting the characters of Zoe and her children in naturalistic lighting with a sense of warmth in the image to connote a conventionally happy and upright family ambiance. The hybrid of these two images, in one loosely framed shot allowing space for graffiti on the ‘bad’ side of the wall’ and the appearance of cleanliness of the ‘good’ side, creates a diversity in the characters that not only supports the trailer, but also supports our chosen distributor channel; Channel 4, who’s mission statement pronounces their aim to produce innovative, new talent that presents the diversity of Britain. The focus of the poster is most definitely the character of Martin, who centres the image with a crack running from the brick wall behind him, down his face and body. Either side of this crack, we have changed the colour and lighting of his image to match that of the other characters and the wall itself, which hints the themes of a double-life and secrets that are revealed further in the trailer.

Overall, we believe that, although the colourful, colloquial and informal house-style of TV listings magazines that we have adhered to destined that we were unable to endorse the same dramatic and dark tone of our poster, our main product and ancillary texts work well together. Our magazine adheres to the generic conventions of TV listing magazines and would attract a mass audience, while our poster appeals to ours and channel 4’s target audience of those aged 15-25 with it’s modern and mysterious design and our main product is a true moving reflection of these images - all three products imply themes of love, secrets and affairs.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

A majority of the audience did not understand the connection between specific characters within our trailer. To overcome this we realised that we needed to have included a scene where the connections between the three major character were more evident. This is because we did not include a scene that contained the male protagonist and his wife, therefore, their marriage was unclear to the viewers of the trailer. We also discovered that differentiating between the flash back scenes and the present with the use of colour saturation made the concept of of trailer easier to comprehend. Due to personal preference we found that the majority of the audience thought that the music did not detract from the trailer yet, the minority believed that it distracted from the concept. However, those that thought the track added to the atmosphere of the storyline being presented, also said that it helped with understanding the central female character's surreptitious behaviour.

Through the layout and decoration within our poster, more specifically the crack that separated the two groups of characters, the audience found the links between all the characters much more obvious and got a better impression of the trailer plot. The contrast between the squalid and virtuous side made the characters agendas more apparant as well as foreshadowing possible future happenings. None of our audience would change the poster and if if they past it on a billboard or saw it in a magazine they would stop to look at it because of the bold colours, clear understanding and the intriguing design.

Our target audience liked the magazine because it adhered to the conventions of a real media product, it looked realistic and clear.  The magazine wasn't too over crowded, and by having our soap picture big and in the central position it was made clear as to what soap the magazine will focus on. We included other soaps within our magazine which the audience liked as it made the magazine more interesting and showed them the variety of reviews it would contain. The audience wouldn't change anything about the magazine.

How did you use new media technologies in your media construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

The construction of our media products employed new media technologies to not only film, but also to edit footage with interesting and high quality effects and create a poster and magazine adhering to the conventions of professionally produced magazines and advertising.

We used video editing software called 'Videopad' that enabled us to generate filters that improved the portrayal of characters, themes and the overall plot of our trailer. After experiencing problems last year with the Adobe Premier Elements software, losing our edited film completely at one point, we decided to try this software and fortunately we were able to produce a film of the same quality as what can be produced on other, more popular softwares. This technology was incredibly simple to navigate; the speed in which we were able to apply a diverse range of effects was extremely fast, therefore making the whole process much more time efficient, yet still delivering an outcome of a high standard. The software consisted of a variety of transitions, effects and abilities to manipulate the clip itself, not only did this improve the presentation of imagery within our trailer but it also allowed us to control multiple sound clips of dialogue, sound effects and tracks. Thus, enabling us to add appropriate background music to enhance to impression that we wanted out trailer to exude, as well as being able to improve speed and volume of the dialogue within a scene to increase the impact of individual events. Furthermore, this modern software gave us full power over all aspects of our product, supported and improved our ideas and helped us to create an outcome to the best of our ability.

Additionally, to create our poster and magazine cover, we used Adobe Photoshop Elements. Although the software allowed us to add enhancing effects to individual images such as contrast filters and airbrushing to produce a high-quality finish, the creation of shapes, borders, logos and fonts was incredibly time-consuming as it was difficult to cut out detailed areas, align them correctly and achieve the vision we had. We feel pleased with the outcome of our ancillary products, particularly the TV listings magazine cover, however while we believe our poster has an interesting and effective concept, we feel that with more time we could enhance the effects we have already employed to a more dramatic and higher standard.

Our blog helped us to organize and display our findings, research and ideas. By using the blog we were able to keep track of what we had achieved so far and what we needed to progress on. We had meetings which posted onto the blog, clearly displaying things that we needed to develop and improve.
For almost all of the group, this was the first time using a blog and so could be difficult and confusing to operate at times, however we fully understood the importance of using this technical device, as a blog is another avenue to hypothetically promote a new soap opera and observe, consider and involve the reactions, hopes and expectations of viewers to consequently create a loyal fan-base. With the enormous growth of the digital age, whereby audiences are no longer passive and are prosumers, a blog would allow us, launching a new product, to gain otherwise unobtainable thoughts and views to shape our soap from those at the fore-front of the proliferating digital age - our young target audience.

Overall, the efficiency and quality of technology was prevalent in all stages of our production. As well as trying a new type of technology, in the form of blogging, we felt comfortable in our abilities to use cameras and editing software. After experiencing many problems when constructing film projects last year, ranging from corruption of files on editing software, to the unreliability of camera quality, to complete loss of our work; we took every precaution to avoid a reoccurrence of these problems. 
While changing the devices we used may have limited us - although we used a camera that primarily functions for photographs instead of a specific video-camera, it in fact produced filming of a higher-quality than other cameras available to us, and opting for a lesser-known video-editing software gave us  different effects to use and a programme that was actually easier to navigate - we feel incredibly satisfied with the final products we created and our ability to adapt to new technologies has given us many new skills.