In order to evaluate the main strengths and weaknesses of my individual ancillary products i have written a paragraph for each of my trailer, magazine cover and webpage outlining what i feel worked well and what could have been improved/changed.
Trailer:
I feel our main strengths in our trailer was our use of real media conventions. Like real media products we tried to include as many typical conventions as possible as we believed that this would be the most effective way in attracting our target audience. We included conventions such as soundtrack (to create an eerie, tense and awkward atmosphere),camera angles/framing (to manipulate the audiences point of view), editing techniques (such as fades and dissolves to tie the footage together in the appropriate way. And also representation (showing a focus on a group(s) within society- and in our case we focused on teenagers)
I believe that our main weakness was our complicated storyline, as we found that with conventional trailers the storylines presented were minimalistic and easily followed, however due to our in-depth complicated storyline we needed to establish a number of things with our audience in our first trailer. Although effective in other areas we found from audience feedback that this made the trailer harder to follow and create a continual flowing theme through out.
As it being our first try at creating a soap trailer and not having any previous experience in this field, i believe that as a first product our trailer is a success. From the process of creating this product both as a group and individually we were able to gain a number of different skills, some of my personal skills include learning how to use a number of different programme techniques such as Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and iWeb, matching a soundtrack to footage and also how to effectively carry out basic camera skills.
If we were to carry out the task again my group will change the effort and time spent on planning filming days so that there was no time lost on the day of filming due to lack of preparation. This was especially the case on our first day of filming, as previously we did not know to the full extent what was required of us planning and preparation wise and so we waisted time time on tasks that should have been done more effectively before hand. On our second and final days of filming we had previously made sure that a variation of planning and preparation had taken place, as for each day we planned each scene,involving camera angles, framing, editing (fade/dissolve), character position, props and also location of scene.
Magazine Cover:
As research into contemporary soap magazines i was bale to decide what type of 'look' i wanted to go for, as on the market there at two particular styles of soap magazines. The look that i went for was similar to that of the 'Radio Times'compared to a cheaper style of 'TV Choice'. I felt that is better suited our product and our target audience.
For the creation of my magazine cover i used a variation of products to benefit
specific areas of my cover, for example i used Photoshop to edit an image, i used
Microsoft word document to edit text and create text boxes and shapes. i also
used iWeb to mock up a draft of what i wanted my cover to look like.
I feel my magazines cover main strength is the full length image and bright bold
text.Its most effective in attracting a reader and creating curiosity as to what is
inside. I believe that my magazine is effective in advertising my groups product
I.V and its main storyline.
However i feel my main weakness of my magazine is the main advertisement of one
product, i feel that my product would have been more effective if i included the
advertisement of other contemporary media products, therefore broadening our
media product.
Webpage:
My groups joint effort in the creation of our website allowed us to expand on our
creativity and ideas, and give us the benefit of offering a mixture of conventions
that are featured on our website. Thus broadening our target
audience.
My groups webpage main strength was in the creativity and ideas involving the
content of our page. My group did a variety of individual and group work involving
research into contemporary soap websites, studying what they offered to the
audience, how they did it, and what techniques they used to do so.
Our groups main focus was to attract our target audience, we did this in a number of
ways, including, competitions, polls, gallery of images, cast crew interviews and
also videos. i believe that because this was my groups main focus it turned out to be one of
be our strongest area. However an area in which we were lacking in was the
broadening appeal in which our webpage could have offered, as we focused our
page specifically on one group in particular- teenage girls, our webpage
unconsciously turned out to target girls rather than boys i belive this is due to the fact
fact that we are all girls and also in our research we found that girls are more
likely to watch soap operas compared to boys, thus real soap websites lean more
towards females (of all ages) in their target audience.
