Music research

For our trailer, it was important that we used music There were many songs that we liked and felt would suit our soap and appeal to our target audience, but there were problems as we had to make sure that any music we used within our trailer wasn't copywrited. We went online and looked at a few different free music websites, but the quality of music was low and as we wanted to make the trailer as realistic and professional as possible, we went looking on other shring websites, such as youtube. There were a few that we considered:

Anotsu - Man On The Run
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqqInVXkujY

In the end though, we found a song that we liked: 4 String - Take Me Away (Neucore remix). As it was a remix of a song with free downloads, it meant that it wasn't copywrited. The song worked well with our trailer as the music was quite upbeat and exciting, so it would encourage people to watch it, and it fit the current trend in music as the song is dubstep. Dubstep is bassy music which is mostly popular with teenagers and young adults, and because it is used in other soap advertisements, it encourages our target audience to watch it.

                                     

Editing our soap

Once we'd finished filming, next came the editing. This was the most difficult thing of all in my opinion, as you had choose and cut which parts you wanted to use, and edit it to get the full effect of how you wanted it to look. To edit our film, we used the programme 'Final Cut Pro 10'. This programme was a step up to the one I used last year, Adobe Premiere. The most noticable difference between the programmes is that Final Cut allowed me to do much more tool wise. Final Cut also allowed the use of different transitions and effects, and I included some in my soap trailer to make it look like a professional and realistic. Below are some of the transitions and effects I used:

Transitions'Directional' - blur effect to the right, representing change in scene
'Zoom and Pan' - adds emphasis to the speech whilst changing scene and keeping up the pace
'Bloom' - bright white light, showing a change between night and daylight
'Peel' - peeling the E4 logo off the screen

Effects
'Threshold' - changes the contrast of the black and white baby scan, adding emphasis
'Earthquake' - shot shakes, adding emphasis to the action where the girl is pushed backwards by the boy

'Romance' - blurs the screen a little to focus on the two characters holding hands, creating a romantic atmosphere 

Photos of our characters

This is a photo of the two characters from our second scene. We used a young adult and a child as our characters to seem stereotypical and deal with issues you encounter in life and therefore soaps, such as teenage pregnancies.

This photo is of another stereotypical character. Ricky has a large hoody, which to the older generation represents danger. The length of his hair and his posture suggests his upbringing is rough, and some people could class him as a 'chav'.

Here is a photo of three main characters from one of our last scenes. The grandparents combined with a young girl suggests an alternative family, possibly pointing at family problems that so often appear in typical soaps. The variety of older and younger characters also means that it can appeal to many different audiences.

Similar to the first photo, this is also a teenage girl who is pregnant. Again, this is a controversial storyline which would be interesting to a young audience. She looks much younger than the girl in the first image though, so it adds to the shock value.

Change in schedule

Due to an incident which meant that the both of our groups were left with only one HD camera, it meant we had to delay our filming and change our schedule to after the othe group had finished with it. Therefore, our schedule is as follows:

Tuesday 29th NovemberFilm Aleisha and baby Charlie arriving off of the train at the train station, including Ricky biking past.
Filming Helen walking as she looks at her new baby.

Sunday 4th December
Film Toni's grandparents and their granddaughter arriving at the street, including Ricky biking past again.

Friday 9th December
Film Eva at my house, running away from home to go to the new area.

Monday 12th December
Film Toni, Mark and myself, love triangle, outside a pub

Filming our soap

Final Deadline, 16th December

Changed idea

While our initial idea worked, we focused on coming up with an even better idea that would reflect a soap trailer instead of just scenes from a soap. As I mentioned in the post before, our recurring theme would be new because the soap is being advertised as new, so I wanted to show a variety of scenes where characters are having 'new starts' or have new things in their lives, and the sketch above shows how I imagine all these new starts would be. People arriving by different transport, like planes, cars and vans, under different circumsances as shown by the bottom image of a man hitchhiking, with pretty much just the clothes on his back. The way the characters all arrive would make the audience wonder the characters' back stories, and what caused them to come to this.