Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Many technologies were used in this project.  Throughout the research and planning stages, the internet played a major part in our progress, from this website, blogger.com, for example, which enabled us to easily document our findings and progress to Google Images, to illustrate our findings.  Sites such as Scribd transcribed our Word/Publisher documents for viewing on the blog.  Thanks to the internet we found a site that let our Powerpoint documents be viewed on the blog also: slideshare.net.  This was very helpful as it meant we could display our work in another different format.  On-demand websites, YouTube and television meant we could watch pre-existing soaps to analyse in order to know what we needed to include in our own soap opera and inspire us.  In these planning stages we also experimented with some of the programs on the Mac to decide what software we like the best and the results we got from them.  We used GarageBand to create our own music tracks which we could've used as the backing of our trailer, however we didn't use these in the end as we preferred the pre-exsiting, non-copyrighted sounds in iMovie.  To create the poster and magazine I experimented with Photoshop to see what effects I could create and gain some more experience with it.  A scanner was used as a way of getting some written documents, such as the draft storyboard, onto the blog.  For the animatic and photographic storyboard we used Movie Maker to put them together before uploading them to YouTube, in order to get access to them and upload them to our blog. 

The camera we used to film our trailer

We edited our trailer on an Apple Mac

The construction of our media texts (trailer, poster and magazine) was very hands-on and involved the use of a video camera (HD Panasonic) to film the trailer and a Mac and iMovie to edit the footage together.  We also used YouTube as a way of distributing our trailer.  From here we could embed the trailer onto our blog.  An SD card was used to store the clips and a USB/memory stick was used to store our  trailers on before uploading to YouTube (and as a back up, in case anything went wrong on the Mac). In the end, I used Publisher to design the layout of our poster and magazine due to the ease of moving images and adding text/effects, however I chose to use Photoshop to crop out backgrounds from images which gave a professional outcome.  I sourced the Channel 5 logo, on the poster, from the internet.  I used photographs from a Nikon D3100 and stills from the clips filmed on the Panasonic video camera for on the magazine as I knew we couldn't use copyrighted images from the internet.  When looking for feedback on our trailer, magazine and poster we uploaded them to social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.  This way, we got non-biased feedback as it wasn't from only our friends/families but strangers.  Without new media we would be unable to receive feedback as easily and effectively as we did.

MovieMaker was a quick and easy way to edit evaluations;
it was also surprisingly effective.

Again, Blogger was used for the initial drafts of my evaluations.  Movie Maker was a good way of animating them where I could use video clips and image montages.  I could also do a voiceover, as I have for Question 1 of the evaluations where I did a 'director's commentary' on the Mac over our trailer.  For Question 2, I filmed myself, using my HD Nikon D3100, as I spoke about my media texts.  I have found that Movie Maker was actually the best format for getting my point across as I could add pictures and videos, voiceovers and sound and I didn't feel I was restricted.  However, since using Prezi for Question 3, I have found it is even easier to do these things mentioned than on MovieMaker.  I am enjoying Prezi - it looks very modern, professional and I like the way it 'flies' between sections.  You can also easily go back to linking screens and input different formatted media into the presentation easily (such as YouTube videos, PDF documents and images).  On reflection, without new media, we couldn't have created this project as easily as we have.  Without it, tasks would have been more lengthy and a struggle to complete.

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

Evaluation: What have you learnt from your audience feedback?

We got our audience feedback through first-hand viewings of our trailer; where we invited members of our target audience (16-60 years) to watch it and by uploading it to social networking sites; Facebook and Twitter.  We received interesting and unbiased feedback through Twitter, as our 'followers', of whom we do not know in person, commented truthfully, thoughtfully and with a judgemental eye.  We found feedback from Facebook was not as reliable as 'friends' would say nice comments so as not to hurt our feelings, even after telling them to be brutally honest!

Audience feedback is so important to us as it depends on this that, if we were to air this soap opera on television, it would become either a success or a flop.  By listening to our audience and what they want to see, we are reducing the risk of our soap not being successful as we know they will continue to watch the soap as it is tailored to them, so stands more of a chance of doing well.  Obviously, if we didn't change elements of our production, it wouldn't do so well if it was aired as the viewer would switch it off if they didn't like it.

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

Our poster and magazine are also conventional to their real counterparts; but the magazine more so than the poster.  We ensured we included every convention of soap magazines on our own as we suspected there would be little room for experimenting if we were to create a real-life soap magazine, which has to conform to certain regulations - for example, displaying various soap stories on it (with images and screenshots from the soap opera that are always stereotypically verisimilitude to easily recognisable scenes of everyday life), following the left-third rule to make for easy viewing for the potential buyer and a bold, catchy title and captivating text.  All these conventions are essential to entice the buyer to purchase the magazine.  We didn't think we could subvert conventions to our advantage in this section.

Our poster is slightly challenging of the conventions as we have chosen not to portray every character from our soap on the poster.  We have chosen one particular storyline involving only four characters - more like a poster for an already-running soap opera.  We knew we had a good slogan, "It's not always sweet in Cherry Gardens", and wanted to use this to our advantage and thought the best way to go about this was to be suggestive through our use of characters and positioning; hinting at a plot without giving too much away.

Evaluation drafts

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
In order to make sure our soap opera trailer followed generic conventions of soap operas, we carried out lots of research before we began, to make sure we knew what we had to do to make the outcome realistic and professional.  An important key convention of soap operas is that must have an open narrative, without this they would no longer be a soap opera but an ordinary TV drama.  Because we couldn't show this in our trailer, when planning the narrative to our first episode, we ensured it had an open narrative. 

Soap operas usually have multiple storylines in progress throughout one episode, to create a verisimilitude situation to that of everyday life.  To show the wide variety of characters portrayed in our soap, which suggests there will also be various storylines, we included many of these characters in our soap trailer.  Being a new soap, this was also a good way of introducing the characters to the audience.  We also included different settings in our trailer, specifically chosen to reflect pre-existing soap settings and remain conventional to the soap genre.  Pubs/bars, houses and streets are commonly used settings in Eastenders and Hollyoaks which is why we have also used a pub, street and house setting. 

There is minimal use of diegetic sound in soap opera trailers, like in our own soap trailer.  However, we did challenge this convention slightly as we edited an exaggerated noise of the punch into our trailer for impact to grab the viewers' attention.  Being a new soap opera, we thought we needed to hook the audience from the very start of the trailer following the Uses and Gratification theory where the audience are interested and want to watch the whole episode to find out more.  This reason justifies our decision to leave some diegetic sound in the trailer.

We followed the convention of having titles at the end of our soap opera trailer.  We chose to have this in a visual format, rather than narrated or having both.  The reason behind doing this was due to our decision for our soap opera to be shown on Channel 5 which uses visual title screens.  The BBC usually has the addition of a voiceover overlaying the visual titles.  We decided that it was inappropriate to add other forms of interactive media, such as a Twitter hashtag, onto the title screen (as some programs do to engage their pre-existing audience) as our trailer is advertising a new soap which wouldn't already have a loyal audience so we thought this may discourage more mature viewers, with the majority of Twitter users being of a younger generation, and we didn't want to restrict our audience.

Our camerawork is conventional to that of soap opera trailers, with many establishing shots and close-up/mid-shots to introduce location and characters to the audience.  These close-up shots show the characters' facial expressions which gives the audience an insight into the characters' personalities and how they interact with other characters.  It is important that he acting in the shots is very captivating and believable and the editing seamless to ensure the story is easy to follow, especially when there is no diegetic sound, in order for the trailer to make sense and draw the audience in.

Propps' hero/villain/helper theory is apparent in our trailer.  Through multiple cuts and cutaways we are introduced to 2 'villains', Dan and Kirk, with our 'damsel-in-distress' figure being Marris Morris.  We introduce the audience, through continuous/discontinuous? editing, to many possible heroes and helpers but we left the trailer unresolved purposefully as an incentive for the audience to watch the full episode to find out what happens.  This cliffhanger leaves the audience wanting more and is proof of our use of Todorov's theory of equilibrium, however the final stage of equilibrium is not shown. 

From our research into soap opera characters we found there were lots of stereotypical characters; with characters with similar attributes in each soap (e.g Michael Moon from Eastenders and Brendan Brady from Hollyoaks - both stereotypical 'bad boys').  Examples of these stereotypical characters found in every soap are often referred to as 'the elderly, wise person' (in our soap opera this role is portrayed by Beryl), 'the strong woman', 'the pregnant teen', 'the matriarch', 'the bad boy', 'the loved-up couple', 'the boss figure' and the 'the villain'.  We couldn't show our representation of each one of these stereotypical characters in our trailer as it would have made it too long, but we did consider them when inventing characters for 'Cherry Gardens'.

Use images and videos of real media products alongside that of your own work - compare and contrast.

We have tried to be as conventionally accurate as possible but we also wanted to make something exciting and new, that hasn't been seen before.  I think we've achieved through our unconventional use of  transitions and the way we edited the piece.

Highlight specifically where you have followed/challenged soap opera conventions.

How effective is the combination of your main product (your advert) and ancillary texts (poster and magazine cover)?
We tried to remain consistent when designing our ancillary texts by including a similar story on both of them.  Our soap opera's slogan is, 'It's not always sweet in Cherry Gardens'.  Because of this, we felt we needed to show a negative story on the magazine and poster to reflect this slogan.  Marris Morris getting attacked by the troublesome youths, Kirk and Dan, is the story we chose to be the focus of our main product and ancillary texts.  We felt this was a relatable storyline for the audience, which would hook them onto the soap, and reflected our slogan well.  We also considered adding a narrative voiceover to the end of our trailer saying 'It's not always sweet in Cherry Gardens', to link the products further, however after research, this didn't comply with similar adverts on Channel 5.

Our trailer focuses upon the character of Marris Morris and his attackers, Dan and Kirk.  Other characters in the soap are then introduced through Marris' memories and flashbacks of the village people, in his confused state, of Beryl Clark, his son, Dom Morris and more, and various settings such as his pub, the church, village shop and the road Cherry Gardens gets it's name from.  We focused the poster on the same storyline that is shown in the trailer.  This is because, as it is a new soap, the storyline shown in the trailer is the only one viewers are familiar with.  If we used different characters on the poster, the audience may not realise the two texts are related.  Cherry Gardens would be shown on Channel 5 and because of this, we had to include their logo on our poster so the audience knows where they can watch the soap.  We didn't put the Channel 5 logo onto our trailer (this isn't a characteristic of Channel 5 adverts), but the title screen at the end of the trailer is as similar to the real thing as we could make it and features the Channel 5 website - which is an indicator of the channel it is to be shown on. 

The magazine was different to the poster, in the respect that we had to think how an outside institution would portray our soap and storyline to the viewer, rather than how a company would promote their own soap.  A magazine company wouldn't use a soap's slogan as we found from research.  They make their own witty, revealing titles up for each story they cover.  We thought that they would continue with our story of the teenagers and Marris (as we have in our trailer and poster) as it is a new soap and they wouldn't have any additional footage or images they could use, unless they had their own photoshoot with the actors but we didn't think they would pay to do that, in case the soap opera wasn't successful, in which case it would have been a waste of money. 

To create the connection of our magazine to our poster, we used part of the same image used on the poster to make it obvious to the buyer of the magazine that, again, the two products are related and not confuse them by using other, less familiar, characters.  Because the magazine mentioned Marris, we needed to include him on our poster to create a link between the products to ensure our audience remained drawn into the story, without getting confused with multiple storylines.  The use of young and mature characters engages a youthful and mature audience - we did this as we want our soap to be suitable for everyone, from 16 - 60 years (a convention of soap operas).  To make it even more obvious to our audience that our products are all promoting the same new soap opera, we kept to a similar colour scheme throughout; red, white and black.  We chose the colour red as it has connotations of blood and horror (which suggests how badly Marris is injured), conveniently is the colour of cherries, and  is the colour of choice for Channel 5, so it seemed the perfect colour to use in the promotion for 'Cherry Gardens'.

What have you learnt from your audience feedback?
Since rough cut 1 of our soap opera trailer to rough cut 3, we've received audience feedback to help us in finding out what our audience want to see and how we can progress in making our soap opera trailer enticing, understandable and interesting.  We asked them to be truthful and tell us what they liked about it, what they didn't (and reasons behind these points) and how they thought we could improve it.  We then adapted our trailer if we received many comments regarding the same thing.  Sometimes we had contradictory points made of which we ignored, as we assumed it came down to opinion, which meant there wasn't much we could do about these issues to please everyone.  This seemed to be the case with the music and it wasn't that it appealed to older people and not to younger generations, for example, as a 17 year old said: "music maybe too over the top", and an 18 year old: "really like the music" and that it "is really suitable".  Comments like these were quite frustrating as there wasn't much we could do about the situation - but we realise you can never please everyone, even in a professional industry, but we had to compromise and strive to please as many as possible!

The feedback also made us realise how much more research we needed to do in order to make things look professional, for example, our title screen.  At rough cut 2, we weren't thinking about the title screen at the end but more on the order of clips, but from the feedback, we realised a professional-looking title screen was important to people in order for them to take it seriously and the lack of one negatively affected their opinion on the whole trailer.  We quickly researched title screens on Channel 5 and made ours look as similar to them as possible for rough cut 3, which was then well-received by the audience and made them look at the whole trailer in a different light.  Another piece of feedback that didn't hinder our progress but we felt like we couldn't do anything about it was, "It would have been better with speech".  Again, we weren't able to do much about this, as conventionally soap trailers don't tend to have diegetic sound.

I was encouraged to use my initial 'Soapy Scene' magazine layout idea after receiving positive feedback on it that said it was eye-catching and followed soap magazine conventions such as the left-third rule.  This is why we used this layout, instead of designing a new one, for our magazine promoting Cherry Gardens.  Feedback on our poster layout idea told us that it looked too like a poster for a horror film because of the blood runs.  People generally thought it was too over-the-top for a soap poster so we tamed it down for the final poster. 

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?
Many technologies were used in this project.  Throughout the research and planning stages, the internet played a major part in our progress, from this website, blogger.com, for example, which enabled us to easily document our findings and progress to Google Images, to illustrate our findings.  Sites such as Scribd transcribed our Word/Publisher documents for viewing on the blog.  Thanks to the internet we found a site that let our Powerpoint documents be viewed on the blog also: slideshare.net.  On-demand websites, YouTube and television meant we could watch pre-existing soaps to analyse in order to know what we needed to include in our own soap opera and inspire us.  In these planning stages we also experimented with some of the programs on the Mac to decide what software we like the best and the results we got from them.  We used GarageBand to create our own music tracks which we could've used as the backing of our trailer, however we didn't use these in the end as we preferred the pre-exsiting, non-copyrighted sounds in iMovie.  To create the poster and magazine I experimented with Photoshop to see what effects I could create and gain some more experience with it.  A scanner was used as a way of getting some written documents, such as the draft storyboard, onto the blog.  For the animatic and photographic storyboard we used Movie Maker to put them together before uploading them to YouTube, in order to get access to them and upload them to our blog.

The construction of our media texts (trailer, poster and magazine) was very hands-on and involved the use of a video camera (HD Panasonic) to film the trailer and a Mac and iMovie to edit the footage together.  We also used YouTube as a way of distributing our trailer.  From here we could embed the trailer onto our blog.  An SD card was used to store the clips and a USB/memory stick was used to store our  trailers on before uploading to YouTube (and as a back up, in case anything went wrong on the Mac). In the end, I used Publisher to design the layout of our poster and magazine due to the ease of moving images and adding text/effects, however I chose to use Photoshop to crop out backgrounds from images which gave a professional outcome.  I sourced the Channel 5 logo, on the poster, from the internet.  I used photographs from a Nikon D3100 and stills from the clips filmed on the Panasonic video camera for on the magazine as I knew we couldn't use copyrighted images from the internet. 

Again, Blogger was used for the initial drafts of my evaluations.  Movie Maker was a good way of animating them where I could use video clips and image montages.  I could also do a voiceover, as I have for Question 1 of the evaluations where I did a 'director's commentary' on the Mac over our trailer.  For Question 2, I filmed myself as I spoke about my media texts.  I have found that Movie Maker was actually the best format for getting my point across as I could add pictures and videos, voiceovers and sound and I didn't feel I was restricted.  However, I am also enjoying Prezi - it looks very modern, professional and I like the way it 'flies' between screens.

Talk through the technologies you used to create your product at each stage - paragraph on research and planning, paragraph on construction and paragraph on evaluation.
Discuss the use of internet and computer programs to create your work.
Be positive about the use of technology.
When discussing your product, you need to mention your trailer, poster and magazine cover.

Cherry Gardens Poster

Cherry Gardens Magazine

Soapy Scene Cherry Gardens