Our Task for the A2 Media Studies course was to create a two minute trailer for a soap opera, the soap had to be one of our own creation. In addition to the trailer we also had to produce a fictional Television magazine cover advertising our new soap and a poster to advertise it as well.
Our intended audience was teenagers, why teenagers? because all of our group members are teenagers meaning that we find them as an audience to be relatable and we will have a similar perspective about what defines good entertainment, making for quite good factors and chance of success.
Our group enjoy the E4 teen drama 'Skins' We decided to base our soap opera on this on the grounds that teenagers like it and the topics covered are quite appropriate and popular with a teenage audience. As a group we wanted to be bold and brash, by that I mean cover any issue that could arise in a storyline, naturally this has to be undertaken carefully for the sake of realism and possibility of alienating audiences. We opted for drug abuse and homosexuality., the reason for this is that most teenagers are either involved or know people who are involved with both of these subjects in one way or another.
The title of our soap was derived from the location... Or at least the initially planned location (The former holiday camp for workers of Ocean Colliery was named Boy's Village, but was closed for development before filming could start) and so Boys' Village was created, I feel it suggests a sense of like fun, although predominantly a male title (as the name BOY'S Village suggests) this is counteracted to become more interesting to female viewers thanks to the tagline of "where the girls come to play."
The production of our soap was only the first task, after this we had to use photoshop to create both a poster and a magazine cover to advertise our soap.
Photoshop was an interesting piece of software, the school computers had two different versions, Elements 4.0 and CS5.1. Both of these are good software but for the poster Cs5 proved the more accessible product for our needs.To have any use out of an editing software, you need photos to edit. We used a pair of professional cameras with our characters posed against a plain back-drop in a photoshoot, this proved to be a highly enjoyable experience. (even though I didn't get to have my photo taken) In this modern era, posters are sadly not enough to capture an audience. Digital and online technologies have usurped the throne of superior advertisement, posters simply cannot compete with internet marketing, with viral videos, huge billboards and McDonalds style synergies... However with our audience of sixth form students and a few teachers in a small environment, posters and covers were all that were economically required.
Despite all of us directors clearly requesting the cast not to dye their hair until all work has been finished. one of our actors did . Being resourceful we took this as an opportunity to express that teenagers don't have one fixed identity but instead change as they go along. We used this visual image in our poster to highlight it to our audience.
I intended to have my front cover depicting Zak, Paige and Brandon to reveal their love triangle to the audience. From the photoshoot we resulted in having over a thousand photos to choose from, however for my ideal plan very few were suitable, with images not featuring character fully or at awkward angles. My plan to have Zak and Paige canoodling whilst Brandon looked on with fury in the background proved difficult. No photos had all three in and plans to photoshop Brandon into the background were dashed as no photos of Brandon featured his legs! In the end I simply had Zak and Paige on the cover, this shows that Zak has removed all emotional attachment to Brandon as he has been excluded.
I wanted the theme of drug addiction for my poster so I took a photo of BEn lying on the flooring looking rather worse for wear holding a rolled up piece of paper that looks like (but isn't) a cigarette of cannabis, the use of mise en scene here was lots of party stuff such as balloons, poppers and other paraphernalia. Once this was done photoshop CS5.1 was used to implement that effective tool known as HDR toning, this was used to add immense clarity and emphasis on colours to create that colourful, bright image that people associate with drugs, this fitted perfectly with our advertising tagline of Parties, Pills and Puberty.
URGENT Where are your ancillary tasks ? JS
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