Sunday, 4 March 2012

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

As a way of explaining the conventions of our product and our ancillery texts and our use of synergy between them, we combined the three and recorded a voiceover. Helen and I took it in turns to talk about our soap trailer, and seperately to explain about our individual posters and magazine front covers.



Helen - For our A2 coursework we planned and filmed a conventional soap trailer as well as our two ancillary texts; a poster and a television magazine front cover. We decided on the name ‘Conway’ for our soap, after getting inspiration from local road signs, as most soaps are named after and based on real places. 

Rowen - Our tag line, ‘How would you survive a new life’, reflects the fact that it is a new soap and promotes the idea of real life struggles and controversial story lines which our audience can relate to.  This tag line was also included on our posters, showing the use of synergy.

Helen - Our soap trailer starts out with the character playing a pregnant girl.  We used her at the beginning, as well as on our poster, as this makes the soap easily recognisable for the audience continuing the use of synergy.  We also used the male character, who biked past in the first and last scene, to create a connection between the characters and linking them together within the new area.
Rowen - We chose the setting of the second scene to be a train station as one of our recurring theme was for people to be arriving at different destinations, as a way of a new start, and this synergy again promotes the idea of the soap being new. 
Helen - The characters are stereotypical with teenage pregnancies and young mums at an all time high.  I focused on this controversial issue by making the image the main focus point of my magazine. In my poster I chose to use only one character as it reflects her isolation, as young mums can sometimes feel alone and not accepted within society.  My idea was that there would be more than one poster, with different characters, reflecting each individual story however I chose to create one with this character as I feel her storyline is particularly dramatic and relatable for the target audience as it is a contemporary issue. 
Rowen - My poster is similar, with the background of the poster being dark and isolated, showing pathetic fallacy as the pregnant character looks upset. I included two other characters in the background as they weren’t the main focus, but I felt that their stories and issues were the most dramatic. We also addressed the issue of bisexuality, slowing down the pace of our footage at the crucial point of rejection, showing that it is something which is not always accepted within society.  Similarly, I used images of these characters in this contemporary situation because the storyline would be interesting to our target audience. 
Helen - Originally we were planning to broadcast our trailer on BBC1 however; we changed to E4 as we felt that it was better suited because of our younger target audience.  To make our E4 logo look authentic to the channel we added a ‘wipe’ and ‘peel’ transition, which is something that is similarly used by E4 itself. 
Rowen - At the end, we have the character Ricky, dressed in a stereotypical ‘hoody’ fashion, looking directly down the camera in a sinister and threatening way. This relates to our tag line ‘How would you survive a new life?’ as it is hinting at the audience that he will be causing trouble and making everyone else’s lives difficult.
Helen - We used a low angle shot, to emphasise the characters exit, once again relating to the new start.  Different shots are important for our magazine cover and poster as we need close ups of their faces to make them recognisable, and allows the characters to express their emotions for the audience to see. We both researched conventional television magazine front covers in order to make ours as realistic as possible, using a light blue background as to not distract any attention from the foreground images and text. 
Rowen - As well as our main image, we included other images of our characters as sub stories. ‘Playing it… straight?’ was the caption of the main story, and I believed this would be affective as it confronts a contemporary issue and is also word play for a popular television programme at the moment.
Helen - Throughout this project we have learnt how to effectively use soap conventions and believe this allowed us to be able to combine our soap trailer with our ancillary tasks through the use of synergy and relevant editing, creating a recognisable soap for our audience.

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