Evaluation for Unit G324

Sophie Stone – St. Andrews Road

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions
of real media products?
For our media project me and my group created
a 1-2 minute TV soap trailer, a poster to
advertise our product and also a magazine cover
to advertise our product.
For our trailer, we used no dialog
For our TV trailer we decided against using and had music capturing each
dialog as we thought with music and images emotion throughout. We used
alone we could tell the story. In the end we felt royalty free for our music which
this worked due to our ordering but we decided to means its not copy righted and
add 2 slides of words in for extra help to tell our legal for us to use. If our soap were
story. This is the same as many other soap to become a regular show on
adverts as sometimes images are stronger than television this music would become
words, and this is what we wanted to achieve. our theme tune so it could be
On two separate slides we incorporated the recognised as soon as the tune
sentence – “how can one person...change was player, much like other real
everything.” we decided on this sentence as its a media products; the starting drums
short explanation and a simplified quote to tell of Eastenders is always
the whole story. recognised straight away . Our
music is highly dramatic and
However looking at other soap trailers, it is rare becomes more alive at just the
to see slides of text, this is why I think our advert right moments, it’s a very versatile
is different to others. piece of music. It can be perceived
as happy or sad and we can see
We have gone for the theme of an affair as our
the similarities in other soap
main story line with some twists throughout.
adverts chosen music. We feel all
When we came to the decision of using an affair
music used for soap adverts use
as our story line we had many great ideas but
contain juxtaposition.
decided in the end to involve it as a gay affair.
This has been done on soaps before but not on
a regular occurrence so we thought we would
create one that is very dramatic and still
sometimes called controversial in today's modern
day society.
 How effective is the combination of the main product and ancillary tasks?

We created a Soap trailer, a magazine

cover and a poster. To get a good grade
they all had to show continuity and relate to
one another. For our poster we used a We decided to change the
photo of our 3 main characters from our 1 black and white photo,
storyline, we used the same photo for our because it had a white
magazine cover so people would background to it which
understand it is advertising the same thing. made our 1st draft look like
there was blank space.
The poster and the magazine are effective And after looking at other
with the trailer together, because each of existing media products;
them reveals more clues about the magazine covers we found
storyline. Because there is no dialog in the that none of them showed
trailer you of have to piece it together black and white imaged.
yourself, but this is the point of suspense. However when it came to
The magazine cover exposes a kidnap, our poster we found that
matching a shot, a fire, a suicide and the the black and white photo
question that If a character cheats. This against the flames worked
confirms the audiences suspicions but very well.
doesn’t point blank answer the questions
because they are rhetorical. I feel that the combination
of out main product and
The poster exclaims “explosive exit for ancillary tasks combine
who?” so it tells us that a character will be perfectly together. The
leaving but it wont say who. This is to draw soap logo’s are on all 3
the audience in because they want to know products, the hints of the
who is going to leave. This is a clever storyline but none
technique because this ups the ratings, revealing what is to
giving the channel profit. happen, our colour themes
matching when we filmed
We put orange on the poster for the out trailer; autumn and all
season, as this storyline is based in our characters are shown
Autumn, and it ties well with the fire clearly on each to show
‘explosive’ storyline, and we have tried to our audiences continuity.
keep the same technique in with the
magazine cover. We have put yellow and
red in there as well because they are eye
catching.
 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

1. Did you enjoy this trailer? 3. Do you think the shot order helped you understand the storyline?

12

10

6 Series1

4
yes
no
2

0
yes no
Audience Feed Back

I did a survey and asked 10 people a series of questions. This one

showed 100% enjoyment of our trailer. Only 1 person of 10 found it a challenge to sort the storyline out in their head from the
shot order. This wasn’t too disappointing because 90% understood and we feel there was
no other order that would have connected better.

2. At the end of watching this trailer, did you feel you wanted to
watch the show to see what happened? 4. This trailer had no speech or dialog. Did this affect your
understanding of what was happening?

no
Audience feedback

yes
no
no
yes

yes

0 2 4 6 8 10
Me and my group felt that having no speech in our soap opera worked better than we
1 out of 10 of our audience didn’t want to see the turn out of our soap which we weren't too thought because it didn't confuse things at all and the story made sense with just non-
disappointed in because we understand that soap operas are a certain taste. diagetic sound.
 8. Do you think a wide variety of camera angles and shots were
5. Do you feel the music was dramatic and appropriate? used?

yes yes

no no

When it came to our choice of music we got 100% positive feedback.

When it came to camera angles and shots 100% of our audience thought we used a wide
range.

6. Did you think that the issues portrayed in this particular story line 7. How do you think our Actors performed?
reflected everyday issues?

Bad
no
Okay
Good
yes Excellent

no

yes

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

We wanted our audience to look at our camera shots, angles, story lines and use of real
This question could have gone either way because the everyday issues that we chose to media products. The acting was a priority but came after all these points.
portray do not happen to everyone in every day life to each person in our audience.
 Our magazine cover ‘All about soap’

As well as our Soap trailer we created a magazine cover. The time of our soap is autumn so we immediately thought of our
colour scheme, red and yellow like most other soap magazines but orange too.
When going into a shop to buy a soap magazine the buyer will always be drawn to the one that stands out the most. It’s a
competition between magazines to get the most sales, therefore the most money.
Its important to have the name of your magazine clearly displayed because if someone buys our magazine and likes it they
will always come back and look for the next issue and even recommend it to others.
Photos are also a big selling point. Something visual will stick in the memory rather than lots of writing. However text is
important, catch lines need to be big, bold, colourful and short. Its what people will see first.
Rhetorical questions will always draw the audience in. even though they are questions that they know wont be answered until
you actually watch the show, the audience genuinely believe they will have their questions answered.
‘All about soap’ uses quite a lot of text and it makes it look to crowded. Less is more. When all the soap magazines are all on
the self in a line fighting for attention, its the one that stands out in a good way of being co-ordinated, the photos, the taglines
and how the layout has been designed.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and
evaluation stages?

During the planning process of making our soap advert we decided to use an anomatic story board. This option made our work so much easy for us
because we had to get rid of shots for moral reasons, and then because of this re arrange our story. It took far less time to cut and edit a few shots of us
talking than re typing and editing a physical storyboard on paper. We used premiere elements to do this.

Again using premiere elements we made rough cuts of our trailer before we saved the final cut. This was to show us how it was starting to piece together
and look along the way, it helped to have rough cuts to make sure it all made sense. By doing this also, we had the advantage to add in any extra shots or
cut any that were irrelevant in the end.

To keep all of our planning and research we created a wiki blog, using wet paint. This allowed us to create our own website with sectioned headings to
help organise our work into categories. Here is the homepage to our wet paint website... Click here.

We also used the website www.scribd.com to upload our work and embed it on our wet paint site.

To film our trailer we used a hand held camera and tripod. Both were extremely easy to use.

To edit our trailer we used premiere adobe elements ; we regularly had problems when it came to editing our trailer. The program would tend to freeze
and go highly slow but we did get there in the end.

<< premiere adobe

elements.

The digital camcorder

we used. >>
ST. ANDREWS
ROAD