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Tuesday, 27 April 2010
EVALUATION!!!!
A2 practical Evaluation
For the A2 practical coursework we were given a menu of options from which we had to choose from, each option had a man task and the choice of three supplementary tasks. I chose to work in a group of two, working on the following task:
A Promotional package for a new soap opera, to include a TV trailer, together with two of the following three options:
· A listings magazine front cover featuring the new soap;
· A Poster for the soap;
· Two hyperlinked webpage’s (with video extract) for the soap’s website;
We picked the top two supplementary tasks to include in our promotional package.
First of all we had to come up with a soap opera and a storyline that we thought would be appealing to our target audience, which are mainly middle aged women and teenagers. We researched the most popular soap operas at the moment, such as Eastenders and Hollyoaks, and looked in to the main storyline they had covered over the past couple of months. As you can see from my research on my blog we found storyline involving family relationship problems was a recurring storyline in most soap’s so we based it on this. We came up with the idea of having a happily married couple looking through the wife’s mother’s things and coming across her husband’s birth certificate and realising that they are in fact siblings.
After we came up with the idea for the storyline we had to start looking at ways we could film it without giving away too much about the whole plot. We ended up filming in a house setting with the couple putting up Christmas decorations together, so it made it clear that they are married and living together. The filming was quite straight forward as, as you can see from my blog, we had a clear image of what we wanted each scene to look like.
We did encounter one big problem which was due to the camera not being fully charged we ran out of battery and when we uploaded the footage the picture quality wasn’t very good, so we had to set another date and re-film it all.
The soap generally uses conventions of real soap operas as we researched a lot of soap operas and found that most soaps feature continuous storylines dealing with domestic themes and personal or family relationships and tend to have one main storyline that they follow, but the plots are generally open ended therefore smaller storylines can run along side the main one, you can see by our trailer that we have used this convention as the advert is about the main storyline, of the married couple finding out they are siblings, but have also included other characters to show there are other things going on.
It is also set in a typical soap opera setting of a village that has a local pub which the village evolves around and is the typical location for the characters to meet up.
Most episodes of soap operas are usually opened with a ‘hook’, which allows the previous episodes storyline to be continued, and ended with a cliff-hanger, usually a tense un-concluded scene in which a character finds out some shocking news and the zooming in on their traumatised face. This fits in with Barthes idea of the narrative enigma being introduced in order to keep an audience in suspense. We have used these conventions in our soap trailer as it ends with her finding a birth certificate of her husband in her dead mother’s things, and also has a close up of her face and the birth certificate to add suspense. Cliff-hanger’s are also used to encourage people to continue watching the soap to find out what happens, we thought it would be a good idea to use a cliff-hanger in our trailer as we thought it would make people tune to watch the whole episode when it airs.
After collecting all of my audience feed back questionnaires I found that 9/10 people feel my soap trailer is realistic to a real soap opera trailer they would see on the telly.
Personally I think that the combination of our main product and our two supplementary products is very successful and effective, as there is a clear synergy across the texts by the use of characters that appear in them.
We used different slogans on each product as we thought if the same one was repeatedly used people may get bored of it, so instead we had a list of several possible taglines and narrowed it down to just two. I think this was effective as although two different taglines they are related to the same storyline involving the same characters but at the same time not giving too much away and still making people want to watch to see what happens.
I think the billboard is simple yet very effective, with just the logo of our soap in the middle and the characters on each side, almost as if they are leaning against it and a tagline in the middle; this has the connotation of conflict and separation between the characters. The tagline ‘Christmas is a time for family .... However close they may be’ is the longest out of the two, so we used it on the billboard as it had a bigger space for writing and we also thought it gave a little bit more away about the story line than ‘The secret’s out’ which is used on the magazine cover and the trailer.
We thought that a short snappy tagline would be effective on the magazine cover and the trailer as with these forms of media it allows the audience to find out more about the storyline if they are interested by reading the magazine or watching the trailer.
My findings of my audience questionnaire is that 10/10 people that filled out a questionnaire after seeing my products say that they are all very well linked and advertise the same storyline.
When producing my products I used a variety of different software to help make them as realistic as I possibly could, this includes Photoshop and Imovie HD.
Photoshop was used to create my TV Magazine and Billboard poster. It was very useful as it enabled me to edit the photos I had taken of the characters, by reducing the amount of red eye they had in the original photo and also cutting them out allowing me to drop them onto a different background that went with the style of the magazine and billboard.
I think my magazine and my billboard are very believable as real media products as they both keep in the style of other magazine and billboards I had researched.
We decided that the storyline was going to be set around Christmas, as from our research we found was when there was always a very big storyline, which may have been brewing for months finally comes to the surface.
As it is going to be set around Christmas I had to incorporate this is in to all of the products. The magazine front cover is very much keeping in tune with the Christmas style. I have marked it as the Christmas bumper issues which comes out each year and I also used the colour red as it is a very festive colour. By using Photoshop I was able to develop the Christmas style by adding holly to the corners of the masthead and a Santa hat on the top of the T in ‘TV TALENT’, I was also able to put the pictures advertising other shows in to typical Christmas images such as ball balls and presents.
My feedback questionnaire also shows that 10/10 people think the magazine front cover is realistic to a real TV Guide magazine and say it makes them want to watch ‘The Valley’. Also 9/10 people think the billboard poster is realistic to a real billboard poster and say it makes them want to watch ‘The Valley’.
I used Imovie HD on my Mac to edit the trailer and add the soundtrack. Imovie enables you to upload all the footage from your video camera to the computer and then cut and drop scenes in to the correct order; it also lets you input music to your footage. For me it was a big advantage that I have used this software in the past on other projects, as it made it quick and easy for me to pick it up again and get straight in to editing my footage. In the trailer I was able to slow scenes down to add to the dramatic effect and add suspense, I also added the soap logo and a spinet of the soap’s theme tune to the end of the trailer, I thought this was effective as it lets the audience identify what soap it is. The background music used on the TV trailer is ‘Doris Days’ version of ‘Walking in a winter wonderland’ This song fits in really well as it is quite a slow song and it slots in with all the slow motion scenes and really adds to the dramatic suspense, it’s also a well known Christmas song therefore it lets the audience know that the storyline is set around Christmas.
As stated on my blog we did come across a few problems that we had to fix along the way. The main problem was while filming the camera ran out of battery and then the footage we filmed was not very good quality so we had to re-film it all. Also we had a bit of with the billboard as in the brief it is stated as a poster and we were unable to find any examples of posters advertising soap operas. So we discussed it with our teacher who said a billboard would be fine, as it is a type of poster. We came across another problem with the length of the trailer as most trailers have an average time of around 10-30 seconds. We did have the idea of making a series of trailers for the soap about the same storyline as it develops over time. However in the end when we referred back to the brief it only requires us to make one TV trailer, therefore we stuck to our original idea.
After looking back on my audience feedback questionnaires I can see there is an overall very positive reaction to my media products with 10/10 people said it is believable as a real soap and a real storyline and also said that they would watch ‘The Valley’ if it was a real soap opera.
For the A2 practical coursework we were given a menu of options from which we had to choose from, each option had a man task and the choice of three supplementary tasks. I chose to work in a group of two, working on the following task:
A Promotional package for a new soap opera, to include a TV trailer, together with two of the following three options:
· A listings magazine front cover featuring the new soap;
· A Poster for the soap;
· Two hyperlinked webpage’s (with video extract) for the soap’s website;
We picked the top two supplementary tasks to include in our promotional package.
First of all we had to come up with a soap opera and a storyline that we thought would be appealing to our target audience, which are mainly middle aged women and teenagers. We researched the most popular soap operas at the moment, such as Eastenders and Hollyoaks, and looked in to the main storyline they had covered over the past couple of months. As you can see from my research on my blog we found storyline involving family relationship problems was a recurring storyline in most soap’s so we based it on this. We came up with the idea of having a happily married couple looking through the wife’s mother’s things and coming across her husband’s birth certificate and realising that they are in fact siblings.
After we came up with the idea for the storyline we had to start looking at ways we could film it without giving away too much about the whole plot. We ended up filming in a house setting with the couple putting up Christmas decorations together, so it made it clear that they are married and living together. The filming was quite straight forward as, as you can see from my blog, we had a clear image of what we wanted each scene to look like.
We did encounter one big problem which was due to the camera not being fully charged we ran out of battery and when we uploaded the footage the picture quality wasn’t very good, so we had to set another date and re-film it all.
The soap generally uses conventions of real soap operas as we researched a lot of soap operas and found that most soaps feature continuous storylines dealing with domestic themes and personal or family relationships and tend to have one main storyline that they follow, but the plots are generally open ended therefore smaller storylines can run along side the main one, you can see by our trailer that we have used this convention as the advert is about the main storyline, of the married couple finding out they are siblings, but have also included other characters to show there are other things going on.
It is also set in a typical soap opera setting of a village that has a local pub which the village evolves around and is the typical location for the characters to meet up.
Most episodes of soap operas are usually opened with a ‘hook’, which allows the previous episodes storyline to be continued, and ended with a cliff-hanger, usually a tense un-concluded scene in which a character finds out some shocking news and the zooming in on their traumatised face. This fits in with Barthes idea of the narrative enigma being introduced in order to keep an audience in suspense. We have used these conventions in our soap trailer as it ends with her finding a birth certificate of her husband in her dead mother’s things, and also has a close up of her face and the birth certificate to add suspense. Cliff-hanger’s are also used to encourage people to continue watching the soap to find out what happens, we thought it would be a good idea to use a cliff-hanger in our trailer as we thought it would make people tune to watch the whole episode when it airs.
After collecting all of my audience feed back questionnaires I found that 9/10 people feel my soap trailer is realistic to a real soap opera trailer they would see on the telly.
Personally I think that the combination of our main product and our two supplementary products is very successful and effective, as there is a clear synergy across the texts by the use of characters that appear in them.
We used different slogans on each product as we thought if the same one was repeatedly used people may get bored of it, so instead we had a list of several possible taglines and narrowed it down to just two. I think this was effective as although two different taglines they are related to the same storyline involving the same characters but at the same time not giving too much away and still making people want to watch to see what happens.
I think the billboard is simple yet very effective, with just the logo of our soap in the middle and the characters on each side, almost as if they are leaning against it and a tagline in the middle; this has the connotation of conflict and separation between the characters. The tagline ‘Christmas is a time for family .... However close they may be’ is the longest out of the two, so we used it on the billboard as it had a bigger space for writing and we also thought it gave a little bit more away about the story line than ‘The secret’s out’ which is used on the magazine cover and the trailer.
We thought that a short snappy tagline would be effective on the magazine cover and the trailer as with these forms of media it allows the audience to find out more about the storyline if they are interested by reading the magazine or watching the trailer.
My findings of my audience questionnaire is that 10/10 people that filled out a questionnaire after seeing my products say that they are all very well linked and advertise the same storyline.
When producing my products I used a variety of different software to help make them as realistic as I possibly could, this includes Photoshop and Imovie HD.
Photoshop was used to create my TV Magazine and Billboard poster. It was very useful as it enabled me to edit the photos I had taken of the characters, by reducing the amount of red eye they had in the original photo and also cutting them out allowing me to drop them onto a different background that went with the style of the magazine and billboard.
I think my magazine and my billboard are very believable as real media products as they both keep in the style of other magazine and billboards I had researched.
We decided that the storyline was going to be set around Christmas, as from our research we found was when there was always a very big storyline, which may have been brewing for months finally comes to the surface.
As it is going to be set around Christmas I had to incorporate this is in to all of the products. The magazine front cover is very much keeping in tune with the Christmas style. I have marked it as the Christmas bumper issues which comes out each year and I also used the colour red as it is a very festive colour. By using Photoshop I was able to develop the Christmas style by adding holly to the corners of the masthead and a Santa hat on the top of the T in ‘TV TALENT’, I was also able to put the pictures advertising other shows in to typical Christmas images such as ball balls and presents.
My feedback questionnaire also shows that 10/10 people think the magazine front cover is realistic to a real TV Guide magazine and say it makes them want to watch ‘The Valley’. Also 9/10 people think the billboard poster is realistic to a real billboard poster and say it makes them want to watch ‘The Valley’.
I used Imovie HD on my Mac to edit the trailer and add the soundtrack. Imovie enables you to upload all the footage from your video camera to the computer and then cut and drop scenes in to the correct order; it also lets you input music to your footage. For me it was a big advantage that I have used this software in the past on other projects, as it made it quick and easy for me to pick it up again and get straight in to editing my footage. In the trailer I was able to slow scenes down to add to the dramatic effect and add suspense, I also added the soap logo and a spinet of the soap’s theme tune to the end of the trailer, I thought this was effective as it lets the audience identify what soap it is. The background music used on the TV trailer is ‘Doris Days’ version of ‘Walking in a winter wonderland’ This song fits in really well as it is quite a slow song and it slots in with all the slow motion scenes and really adds to the dramatic suspense, it’s also a well known Christmas song therefore it lets the audience know that the storyline is set around Christmas.
As stated on my blog we did come across a few problems that we had to fix along the way. The main problem was while filming the camera ran out of battery and then the footage we filmed was not very good quality so we had to re-film it all. Also we had a bit of with the billboard as in the brief it is stated as a poster and we were unable to find any examples of posters advertising soap operas. So we discussed it with our teacher who said a billboard would be fine, as it is a type of poster. We came across another problem with the length of the trailer as most trailers have an average time of around 10-30 seconds. We did have the idea of making a series of trailers for the soap about the same storyline as it develops over time. However in the end when we referred back to the brief it only requires us to make one TV trailer, therefore we stuck to our original idea.
After looking back on my audience feedback questionnaires I can see there is an overall very positive reaction to my media products with 10/10 people said it is believable as a real soap and a real storyline and also said that they would watch ‘The Valley’ if it was a real soap opera.
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
audience feedback questionnaire!!
This is the questionnaire that i will be handing out to people after showing them all 3 of our items to get their feedback.
i will be asking both people from our target audience and people not from out target audience to get all responces!
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