Media Studies

Evaluation
Sophie Stone – St. Andrews Road
In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions
of real media products?
For our media project me and my group created a
1-2 minute TV soap trailer, a poster to advertise our
product and also a magazine cover to advertise our
product.
For our TV trailer we decided against using dialog
as we thought with music and images alone we
could tell the story. In the end we felt this worked
due to our ordering but we decided to add 2 slides
of words in for extra help to tell our story. This is
the same as many other soap adverts as
sometimes images are stronger than words, and
this is what we wanted to achieve.
On two separate slides we incorporated the
sentence – “how can one person...change
everything.” we decided on this sentence as its a
short explanation and a simplified quote to tell the
whole story.
However looking at other soap trailers, it is rare to
see slides of text, this is why I think our advert is
different to others.
We have gone for the theme of an affair as our
main story line with some twists throughout. When
we came to the decision of using an affair as our
story line we had many great ideas but decided in
the end to involve it as a gay affair. This has been
done on soaps before but not on a regular
occurrence so we thought we would create one that
is very dramatic.
Our magazine cover ‘All about soap’
For our media project me and my
group created a 1-2 minute TV
soap trailer, a poster to advertise
our product and also a magazine
cover to advertise our product.
For our TV trailer we decided
against using dialog as we thought
with music and images alone we
could tell the story. In the end we
felt this worked due to our ordering
but we decided to add 2 slides of
words in for extra help to tell our
story.
As well as our Soap trailer we created a magazine cover. The time of
our soap is autumn so we immediately thought of our colour scheme,
red and yellow like most other soap magazines but orange too. For our trailer, we used no dialog
and had music capturing each
When going into a shop to buy a soap magazine the buyer will emotion throughout. We used
always be drawn to the one that stands out the most. It’s a royalty free for our music which
competition between magazines to get the most sales, therefore the means its not copy righted and
most money. legal for us to use. Our music is
Its important to have the name of your magazine clearly displayed highly dramatic and becomes more
because if someone buys our magazine and likes it they will always alive at just the right moments, it’s
come back and look for the next issue and even recommend it to a very versatile piece of music. It
others. can be perceived as happy or sad
and we can see the similarities in
Photos are also a big selling point. Something visual will stick in the other soap adverts chosen music.
memory rather than lots of writing. However text is important, catch We feel all music used for soap
lines need to be big, bold, colourful and short. Its what people will adverts use have juxtaposition.
see first.
Rhetorical questions will always draw the audience in. even though
they are questions that they know wont be answered until you
actually watch the show, the audience genuinely believe they will
have their questions answered.
‘All about soap’ uses quite a lot of text and it makes it look to
crowded. Less is more.
How effective is the combination of the main product and ancillary tasks?
We created a Soap trailer, a magazine cover and a poster. To get a good grade
they all had to show continuity and relate to one another. For our poster we used
a photo of our 3 main characters from our storyline, we used the same photo for
our magazine cover so people would understand it is advertising the same thing.

The poster and the magazine are effective with the trailer together, because each
of them reveals more clues about the storyline. Because there is no dialog in the
trailer you of have to piece it together yourself, but this is the point of suspense.
The magazine cover exposes a kidnap, matching a shot, a fire, a suicide and the
question that If a character cheats. This confirms the audiences suspicions but
doesn’t point blank answer the questions because they are rhetorical.

The poster exclaims “explosive exit for who?” so it tells us that a character will be
leaving but it wont say who. This is to draw the audience in because they want to
know who is going to leave. This is a clever technique because this ups the
ratings, giving the channel profit.

We put orange on the poster for the season, as this storyline is based in Autumn,
and it ties well with the fire ‘explosive’ storyline, and we have tried to keep the
same technique in with the magazine cover. We have put yellow and red in there
as well because they are eye catching.

By changing our poster, it is now is far more professional and personal as it is an

‘invite’ so it is as if we are getting the audience involved.
 What have you learned from your audience feedback?

1. Did you enjoy this trailer? 3. Do you think the shot order helped you understand the storyline?

12

10

6 Series1

4
yes
no
2

0
yes no
Audience Feed Back

I did a survey and asked 10 people a series of questions. This one

showed 100% enjoyment of our trailer. Only 1 person of 10 found it a challenge to sort the storyline out in their head from the
shot order. This wasn’t too disappointing because 90% understood and we feel there was
no other order that would have connected better.
2. At the end of watching this trailer, did you feel you wanted to
watch the show to see what happened? 4. This trailer had no speech or dialog. Did this affect your
understanding of what was happening?

no
Audience feedback

no yes
no
yes

yes

0 2 4 6 8 10
2 out of 10 people would have preferred speech in the advert, this if
Only 1 person said no to this question but I feel positive that 9 people said yes. The fact fine because we found it easier and more interesting to tell the story
that 9 people said yes is brilliant as they want to watch more of our soap promo to find out without and after researching other soap promotions most of them
what happens. used no dialogue and just used background music or sound effects,
 8. Do you think a wide variety of camera angles and shots were
5. Do you feel the music was dramatic and appropriate? used?

yes
no
yes
no

Our angles and shots proved that we had variety. The more different angles the more
professional it looks and the more time that looks like has been spent on it. Its all about
effort and we were happy to see our audience can see this.
One thing me and my group members were really pleased with was the music we found.
We found it after looking at only a few clips on royalty free and were very happy with how
perfectly it fitted. And as we got 100% good feedback about the music, this made us even 7. How do you think our Actors performed?
more pleased and confident we had chosen some good music to fit our piece.

6. Did you think that the issues portrayed in this particular story line
reflected everyday issues?

Bad
Okay
Good
Excellent
no

yes
no

yes

Again this question wasn’t a make or break deal because

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
This question could of gone either way, because the issues are everyday issues but the
people I asked may not have encounter these issues at all or could have been through
something more extreme. Soaps create real life drama, whether its only 2 people in the
world been though it or 20 million. Its making people aware of everyday situations.
our actors didn't have to speak, it was all about movement
and expression. Everyone understood the story line and told
us we got the story across clearly and I think that's the main
thing. If we had more time or had to film it again we would
have more rehearsals for our actors and actresses to get
into their characters more.
How did you use new media technologies in the construction and research, planning and
evaluation stages?

During the planning process of making our soap advert we decided to use an anomatic story board. This option made our work so much
easy for us because we had to get rid of shots for moral reasons, and then because of this re arrange our story. It took far less time to cut
and edit a few shots of us talking than re typing and editing a physical storyboard on paper. We used premiere elements to do this.

Again using premiere elements we made rough cuts of our trailer before we saved the final cut. This was to show us how it was starting to
piece together and look along the way, it helped to have rough cuts to make sure it all made sense. By doing this also, we had the
advantage to add in any extra shots or cut any that were irrelevant in the end.

To keep all of our planning and research we created a wiki blog, using wet paint. This allowed us to create our own website with
sectioned headings to help organise our work into categories. Here is the homepage to our wet paint website... Click here.

To film our trailer we used a hand held camera and tripod. Both were extremely easy to use.

To edit our trailer we used adobe elements.