In what ways does you media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Our soap, Amber Valley, uses the typical conventions of a soap set in a small town or village. There is one meeting place where lots of events occur, however ours is an outdoor park and lake, as opposed to an indoor pub, such as the ‘Rovers Return Inn’ or ‘The Queen Victoria’, which is usually used as the typical meeting place. We chose this as we decided the serene setting would juxtapose the horrible events that were to occur in the town of Amber Valley. The park also connotes happy days out with families, rather than the taboo subjects our soap aims to tackle.
The controversial topics our soap tackles are not after a long period of time where they are built up but straight away in the first episode to draw viewers in, as oppose to most soaps which tackle one or two issues at a time. This means our show would have to be very close to the nine o’clock watershed, with possibly even special episodes that would go past it. The idea of special episodes that challenge the normal time frame and showing time is not an unusual convention of soaps and is often done in shows like Eastenders (1985) and Coronation Street (1960). In fact Hollyoaks (1995) has even got a special show, called Hollyoaks Later, where controversial and sex related issues are tackled after the water shed.
Our soap, Amber Valley, uses the typical conventions of a soap set in a small town or village. There is one meeting place where lots of events occur, however ours is an outdoor park and lake, as opposed to an indoor pub, such as the ‘Rovers Return Inn’ or ‘The Queen Victoria’, which is usually used as the typical meeting place. We chose this as we decided the serene setting would juxtapose the horrible events that were to occur in the town of Amber Valley. The park also connotes happy days out with families, rather than the taboo subjects our soap aims to tackle.
The controversial topics our soap tackles are not after a long period of time where they are built up but straight away in the first episode to draw viewers in, as oppose to most soaps which tackle one or two issues at a time. This means our show would have to be very close to the nine o’clock watershed, with possibly even special episodes that would go past it. The idea of special episodes that challenge the normal time frame and showing time is not an unusual convention of soaps and is often done in shows like Eastenders (1985) and Coronation Street (1960). In fact Hollyoaks (1995) has even got a special show, called Hollyoaks Later, where controversial and sex related issues are tackled after the water shed.
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| Hollyoaks Later advert. |
We developed the idea of young adults drinking quite a lot, something that often has quite a bit of media coverage, into the idea of alcoholism. We noticed that there was a definite lack of this subject in the media nowadays. There is a lot of drug addiction and drinking of alcohol, but the idea of addiction to alcohol isn’t one that is tackled much, which is odd as alcohol it’s self is very addictive.
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| Screen grab from our Amber Valley trailer |
Our soap challenges the typical norm of soaps by adding in a schizophrenic character. This character does not fit the stereotypical characters that soaps use often so that the audience connects with them instantly. We do not want our audience to connect with this character easily and so we have made her obviously mentally unstable. This sets her apart very quickly and she is a constant feature that would allow us to create troubling and controversial storylines.
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| Screen grabs from our Amber Valley trailer |
How effective is the combination of your main and ancillary texts?
The combination of out media product and the two ancillary texts is a very effective marketing strategy. Having posters, trailers and magazine covers is an excellent way to intrigue an audience into becoming invested in the product you are advertising. The saturation of advertising creates an instant connection with the Soap and we believe that by having Lilith on the front-cover it allowed us to successfully single her out as the main character, which the audience will connect with quickly as they have seen her in many places.
The idea that soaps are trying to step out of the constraints of tiny budgets and small sets to become less ‘small screen’ and more 'big-screen' is represented in out poster. Soaps achieve this transition by using different camera quality, angles, editing styles and props for special episodes or trailers; for example EastEnder’s Kat and Alfie Moon western style trailer which features a much crisper high definition picture with a more sepia style of editing and a costume style that their characters would not use in day to day filming. We felt this transition an important part of soaps today and therefore a vital thing to represent somewhere within our media texts. We did this in our poster where the headers and footers usually are. Including stills from our footage in a film-reel style layout without making it too movie style and fooling the audience into thinking it’s a poster for a movie and not a soap has allowed us to tackle this soap progression.
In creating our poster, as we previously mentioned, we attempted to stick as close as possible to the conventions of TV magazines; having the same general specifications with regards to layout and colour scheme as most television magazines on the market today. We felt this was important as the sense of familiarity would lull the audience into trusting our magazine and stepping out of their comfort zone to buy it.
Ours differes, however, from most TV magazines as it has only one character on the front cover. The act of singling out Lilith in our ancillary texts means that they mach well with our filmed media piece as a lot of our main product contains scenes of just Lilith or Lilith with other people, while we make it obvious that other characters are key Lilith gets more screen time, showing her to be the obvious focal point.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
Ours differes, however, from most TV magazines as it has only one character on the front cover. The act of singling out Lilith in our ancillary texts means that they mach well with our filmed media piece as a lot of our main product contains scenes of just Lilith or Lilith with other people, while we make it obvious that other characters are key Lilith gets more screen time, showing her to be the obvious focal point.
What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?
In Britain the main two distributors of soaps are the BBC and ITV. They are competitors but have worked out the TV times so that instead of their soaps rivalling each other they work nicely together meaning that avid soap watchers can watch the three main soaps, EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale (1972), one after the other without being forced to chose between them. It is difficult to say which channel would pick our soap up. Coronation Street is a very old soap and while it is trying to become more modern and tackle taboo issues it still has the feel of an old soap, however ITV tackles this with Emmerdale. Over the last decade or so Emmerdale has become very much about the younger generation. It now contains a lot more young characters, ore than it ever did when it first started out, and a lot of the storylines revolve around the younger more glamorous lifestyles. However on the BBC, while they already have EastEnders which tackles taboo subjects they only have one soap which is set in a city like Coronation Street. They could pick up Amber Valley in an attempt to mach Emmerdale’s rural aspect however Amber Valley is a lot harder hitting that Emmerdale.
Obviously our soap trailer would be advertised by what ever channel decided to pick up the soap and our magazines would be sold in shops. For our poster we thought that it could go in bilboards by roadsides and bus shelters.
Who would be the audience for your media product, and how did you attract/address your audience?
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| BBC Logo |
Obviously our soap trailer would be advertised by what ever channel decided to pick up the soap and our magazines would be sold in shops. For our poster we thought that it could go in bilboards by roadsides and bus shelters.
Who would be the audience for your media product, and how did you attract/address your audience?
Our larger audience would range from mid-teens to the very old however our target audience would be the younger generations from teens to mid-30’s. We felt this age range was best for our soap to be quite taboo and hard hitting. We understand that taboo subjects may alienate the older generations however that is expected.
We want to create a dedicated fan base amongst teens and young adults who handle such subjects easier than older generations, giving older generations the option to stop watching should the show become once again too taboo for them. We felt that due to the fact that they are not our target audience they will not be quite as invested in the soap.
We also feel that targeting the younger audience means that as they grow older they will still feel the same dedication to the soap as they used to. This will eventually lead to our soap reaching a larger demographic assuming that it will be running for quite a few years. This technique has been successfully se dint the past by Hollyoaks.
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
In the planning stages we used programmes such as Microsoft Word to plan out our ideas and type up all our blog work before uploading it to blogger to make sure that it was grammatically correct, spelt well and that later on we would have a hard copy as blogger is known to delete blogs on occasion.
Our camera itself had no-editing programs that some of the more modern cameras now come with pre-installed into them but this was not a problem. Our main problem was that we often had to change from camera to camera as our first camera stopped working and ruined some of our pervious filming. This meant the filming process was drawn out longer than we had originally planned. However we were able to overcome it this just meant that some of the footage quality, colour and saturation differs, given a second chance we would have tried again with the camera that worked best however we have made do.
For our editing we used Sony Vegas for. This editing software allowed us to do things like cut out unwanted footage, put clips in slow motion, blur clips, remove some of the colour, reverse shots and much more. Most of the editing techniques were used on the parts where the schizophrenic character was being filmed. We did this in an attempt to show the world as confusing, different and dangerous, the way it might appear through her eyes.
For our ancillary texts we used Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. Most of the creation was done on InDesign to fit with the course requirements, Photoshop was only used to create shapes would could not create in InDesign as we unfamiliar with this software to begin with. However this experience was useful as it allowed our knowledge to develop into an intermediate understanding of InDesign.
The Blogger platform was utilized as a way to incorporate more than one type of media; it is a webpage easily accessible that contains hyperlinks to other webpage’s and videos as well as photo’s and text. We felt that although we had used blogger in previous years just posting continuously, that this was not always the most thorough and organized way. Instead we decided to create pages which would contain different sections of research, information about the industry and our planning etc... This had problems in itself as it is not always clear what information fits into what category as many fit into multiple but it has proved a much better way than the constant posts that run in chronological order from most recent.
Audience Feedback.
Our audience, that consisted of two teenagers, a person in their 30’s and one in their 40’s, said that they felt our soap "contained a good variety of camera angles" and that it followed a lot of the conventions mainstream soaps do, however they argued that there were more camera angles per scene than there normally would be in a soap. To this we explained that this was true but we felt the extra camera angles needed adding in order to make the trailer interesting and keep the audience engaged. It was also suggested that our soap had "not enough of an age range". We responded to this by explaining that firstly not every character has to be in a soap trailer and that trailers often focus on one big storyline. We also explained that we were limited and could only have mainly people of our own age group acting in it so we felt like if we added one adult in it would be a tokenism. We felt this present absence would not contribute to the storyline and would be too obvious so we left all our characters young adults.
Overall, the feedback we received from our audience was very positive and reassured us that even though this trailer does not contain any older generations older adults would still be intrigued and watch it.
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| Screen Print of our magazine half complete |
The Blogger platform was utilized as a way to incorporate more than one type of media; it is a webpage easily accessible that contains hyperlinks to other webpage’s and videos as well as photo’s and text. We felt that although we had used blogger in previous years just posting continuously, that this was not always the most thorough and organized way. Instead we decided to create pages which would contain different sections of research, information about the industry and our planning etc... This had problems in itself as it is not always clear what information fits into what category as many fit into multiple but it has proved a much better way than the constant posts that run in chronological order from most recent.
Audience Feedback.
Our audience, that consisted of two teenagers, a person in their 30’s and one in their 40’s, said that they felt our soap "contained a good variety of camera angles" and that it followed a lot of the conventions mainstream soaps do, however they argued that there were more camera angles per scene than there normally would be in a soap. To this we explained that this was true but we felt the extra camera angles needed adding in order to make the trailer interesting and keep the audience engaged. It was also suggested that our soap had "not enough of an age range". We responded to this by explaining that firstly not every character has to be in a soap trailer and that trailers often focus on one big storyline. We also explained that we were limited and could only have mainly people of our own age group acting in it so we felt like if we added one adult in it would be a tokenism. We felt this present absence would not contribute to the storyline and would be too obvious so we left all our characters young adults.
Overall, the feedback we received from our audience was very positive and reassured us that even though this trailer does not contain any older generations older adults would still be intrigued and watch it.
