Evaluation write up q2
- 1. Christie McVay Evaluation Write Up Q2. HOW EFFECTIVE IS THE COMBINATION OF YOUR MAIN ANDANCILLARY TEXT? The combination of the 3 tasks has meant that I am able to advertise my soap in many different platforms. By creating these different products it means that I can reach my audience through different means. There are two ancillary task that are my magazine front cover and my soap opera poster; these were both created on Adobe Photoshop. I did this because Photoshop is a simple yet effective way of designing and making images that are able to be made to a high quality that can help me create the images and the texts that I want from my magazine front cover. I also found it useful while making my poster for that accompanies that front cover. I wanted to convey a sense of drama that is unique to my trailer as we have used the simple idea of using the board game “Guess Who?” This helps portray a multi- stranded narrative that we have made for the trailer. I have done it so that all the texts have all got some element of Guess who incorporated into it to try and keep it all coherent and so that all the texts relate to each other and come together. I think that because they’re 3 different types of advertisements it means that different people can see it. When you are out you will see the poster on billboards, when you are in the newsagents you will see the magazine and then when you are watching the tele you will see it then. This means that you can potentially see it frequently through the day, which means it’ll leave it in your mind and then you will most likely, due to the amount of advertisement, watch the soap. The ancillary tasks were in individual task, which we did to have as an extra on top of the trailer. The work produced for the front cover of the magazine and the poster was all inspired by the work we did in the trailer. The ancillary tasks were done after the trailer so that I could use the photos from the trailer and the story lines for the magazine. For the ancillary tasks I took the inspiration of the same soaps as we did for the trailer. So for example with the trailer we used the inspiration of Eastenders and Hollyoaks so I also, to keep too coherent, used posters from these two soaps so that it all linked together. Also because the theme of the trailer was murder, I needed to keep the poster in with the style so I again kept it dark themed and also incorporated the whole ‘Guess who’ theme. In the trailer we used what Eastenders did when they released the Kat and Alfie trailer where it was a western themed trailer about Kat returning to the square. So like I said previously, we used the ‘Guess Who’ theme. We devised this idea from the inspiration of EastEnders and then used the Hollyoaks multi stranded narrative aspect. For their trailers they have very short snappy clips of the scenes which reveal a lot but also doesn’t. So they will show a scene for one character and it will be short so only long enough to see their facial expressions and where they are. This is a clever idea which we had to exploit (Abercrombie). The target audience for programs like Hollyoaks and Eastenders is a young age group of 16-25 which is who we aimed our trailer at so to use their trailers for inspiration made a lot of sense.
- 2. Christie McVay Throughout the trailer there was a lot of use of the colour red! This was our enigma clue to what had happened. We thought that this signifies death and blood so it would be in keeping with the trailer. In the trailer we repeated from EastEnders the voice over at the end of it saying where the programme will be shown and what time. Even down to the ident we used a lot of the inspiration from EastEnders again because most soap idents are pretty simple, there just the name in a box or a road sign. So we repeated this with our one and tried to create a road sign which said ‘Upon Thames’ because it seemed a popular thing to do. This is something which my audience will like as soaps are stereotypically watched at home in the front room as a family so a road sign is something people can relate to and personally identify with (Katz) and the more the audience can relate to the soap the more they will enjoy it and will decide to watch it again. Unlike soap operas, where there is a ‘strong women’ theme through the program and the trailers. For example, Peggy was a key example of this as she was the landlord/bar lady who brought up a tough family and she called the shots. The use of strong women is a technique most soaps share because the facts and stats show that it is women who watch the soaps more than men, so this use of a strong women would make the programme more appealing to the women dominated audience and make them feel empowered. However we chose to challenge this and had a more of a tough guy theme because we are aiming less at middle aged women to a younger demographic because it’s something BBC2 what to improve on. So the idea of murder and a main male character was something that we did to try to reach our target audience. I did the poster I created based of the Hollyoaks poster, this poster was set out in a way that the characters faces were next to each other along the top and bottom and then the Hollyoaks ident in the middle. The images were then edited to be pink over the image and blue of the image. Blue for the boys, pink for the girls. So, to repeat this (Steve Neale) I used the images that we took to put into the guess who board game into my poster to add continuity. They were then put into place and then I added a black and white effect to the image to make them look dull to represent to dark storyline and then to repeat the Hollyoaks poster, I inserted a pink square over the top and made it opaque and then the same for the boys but blue. This in my opinion worked really well and it made them all bounces off each other because the different tasks did well to complement each other. With the soap opera magazine front cover, I thought that I needed to include story liens which were key things and issues that are in society which is a “window into the world” (Zeitgeist). I repeated (Steve Neale) the conventions from the ‘What’s on TV’ magazine which helped me get the layout of the magazine page, I noticed that they use a lot of colours and there is not much of an order or neat look about it. Soap opera magazines are quite different from other magazines as they are quite basic and simple in the way that they don’t use a lot of detailed sentences, they keep it pretty easy to read. The target audience that soaps tend to have is stereotypically the lower and middle class families and the stories in them tend to stay pretty
- 3. Christie McVay relevant to issues that these groups of people would face. So the way they present their magazine is done in accordance. My magazine front cover has a layout similar to the soap magazines I researched, I particularly looked at ‘What’s on TV’ for inspiration and I noticed that all of them were relitivly similar. They all use a lot of block colours and a lot of reds and yellows and so I did also. From the top to the bottom of the page; there is a yellow block which has a cover line inside it that has a matching image. From the ones I looked at there was one where it said about a killer being revealed and as my actual trailer is about that I exploited this convention. I liked the way it was above the actual title because it is something which I have only ever seen with soap magazines and no other genre so it made sense to incorporate this. Below that then was the title which was in a bold/fat font along with the other pieces of text in the magazine as bold text was defiantly something which stood out in the magazines. They didn’t use neat, tidy fonts they only really used bubbly fonts so this is why I repeated it. Then there is a cover line with a matching image to the middle left of the page which was boarded with a yellow to make it jump out of the page like the other soaps did. To the right of this, across the middle and right hand side of the page I have the main story which has the biggest images and then a cover line which goes across. This cover line is surrounded by a red bubbly effect. After this there are 3 stories along the bottom which have smaller stories. All these conventions are very much so just on soap magazines so I thought it would be crucial to include them because it seems very apparent that it is unique to soap mags. I think that the conventions on these magazines are very much so done so that it will target a certain type/class of people. The conventions used are targeted to a more of a blue collar community in the way that it presents itself. I then thought that an even better way to reach my target audience of 16-25 year olds would be to have some use of social media, so this is why I decided to add In a twitter logo a trending hashtag of ‘#GuessWhoUT’. So my audience can say there thoughts towards ‘Upon Thames’ and who they suspect had done it.