Creating my soap poster

As mentioned in my previous posts, I used photoshop as a way of editing images and to create my poster and magazine cover. As there was the issue of copyright, we had to use all of our own images in our products and ancillary texts. I went through some of the photographs we had taken of Conway, and found a background image I felt could really adhere to soap conventions and reflect the tone of some of my characters stories. The background is dark and dreary, reflecting pathetic fallacy as the character at the front looks miserable. I inserted another character in the background as one character would be boring for the audience, but one problem I had was that the lighting of the character was too bright in contrast with the foreground character. I realised that it could easily be solved though by turning down the brightness, contrast and colour hue a little.

                                                                                                                      

Further reseach - Soap poster

Posters are an important way of creative advertising, and unsurprisingly, soaps such as Eastenders, Coronation Street and Hollyoaks all have them. One poster I decided to analayse was one for Hollyoaks, which, being a little different to Eastenders, mocks the conventional soap.

Hollyoaks is different to Eastenders and Coronations Street because of both its settings and characters, and this poster makes us to highlight these differences. The left hand poster is basically what Eastenders and Coronation Street is compared to Hollyoaks, mocking the tradtional use of pubs and the stereotypical characters. The characters are portrayed in a less than appealing light, as they are seen as very unattractive and most are overweight. This would be displeasing to an audience who would likely prefer something a bit 'prettier'.

The right hand image is supposed to be a representation of Hollyoaks; bright and glamourous with attractive actors, portraying the difference in traditional soaps to Hollyoaks. It connotes that soaps such as Eastenders and Coronation Street are outdated and belong with the older generation, promoting the idea that the characters are as old as the people that grew up with it. In a way, Hollyoas is trying to promote the idea that everything bad about these soaps, such dirty dogs, violence and obese people, is the complete oposite in Hollyoaks. This is clever, because both posters have the same format and layout, except changing everything on the right into something much cleaner, prettier and more glamourous on the left.

This second poster is an Eastenders poster, advertising a current storyline. Its obvious by the colour scheme, background imge of gravestones and the character's facial expression that the storyline would e dramatic and horrifying, almost definitely relating to death. I liked the idea of the Hollyoaks posters, but because of the lack of glamourous characters and also the realistic stories we included in our soap, I didn't want to create such a cheerful atmosphere in my own poster, so the Eastenders poster was much similar to how I saw my own soap.

Magazine Cover planning

To create a television magazine cover specific to my soap, I started out by taking my previous magazine cover and removing the images. This allowed me to save time and keep my already thought out layout. To do this, I once again used photoshop. The programme was important for the creation of my poster as I had images of my main characters to cut out, using the magnetic lasso tool, and place them on my magazine.

The image to the left is my television magazine front cover in progress to this stage, where I have replaced the main images with two characters in my soap trailer. The cover looks quite plain though compared to others I have looked at, so I want to add a few more sub stories down the bottom, possibly using more characters from my soap. This occurs in television magazines like 'What's on TV' as they will mention the same soap twice if there is more than one interesting storyline going on at a time.

Also, it looks extremely feminine and gives off the impression that it's advertising only to women, and so I want to possibly change the pink text or the pink banners to make it appealing to men as well.

Further research - Soap Magazines

After looking at various magazine covers and the research I did previously, disecting magazines for their convetions such as mastheads etc, I believe I had a better grasp on what television magazines usually look like and usually include.

1. Firstly, almost all of the magazines I looked at had a pale blue background, quite a neutral colour that isn't too brigt, so it doesn't take away from the foreground images.
2. I also noticed that they used a lot of colours in their text and as pugs and banners, filling up a lot of the space to make it looks interesting and exciting. They use reds, yellows, orange and blues regularly so that the colours don't clash though, as this would be unappealing.
3. As well as filling the space up with text, the main image would usually take up at least half of the cover, and the main image would be of recognisable soap characters. This is so that the audience would buy the magazine because of the interesting storyline behind the characters they know.

e4 channel

Our original plan was to have our soap trailer on BBC One, but after taking into consideration the type of programme it would be and how common the use of the BBC One logo was in everyone else's soap trailer, we decided to broadcast it on E4. We chose E4 as it spoke to a younger audience, mostly because of the comedy programmes played on their channel. Similar to Hollyoaks, we had a target audience of 16 - 24 year olds, especially as most of the characters we used were between those ages, but our soap also speaks to other audiences because of the older and younger characters; such as grandparents and children.

As we decided on E4, we had to go about creating the typical E4 logo. After finding an E4 banner on a website, we put it into photoshop and edited it, using the clone tool, to remove the text and then put our own white text over it. The top banner says 'Conway' as it was the most important piece of information, while the bottom banner has further detail like the time and date.