Sunday, 4 March 2012

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?


1 - The first shot introduces our use of synergy throughout the trailer and media products, as the man on the bicycle is seen in the first scene biking past one of the characters, and then again in the last scene cycling down the road. This synergy links the characters and the scenes in our soap together, as he appears to be involved with their lives. I feel that this is important as it supports conventional soaps as characters all usually know each other and their storylines are intertwined. The synergy also continues over to my ancillary texts - the magazine and poster - as I include him and other characters so that the audience can make a connection.

2 - The over the shoulder camera shot is a commonly used conventional camera shot in soaps. Emotion is something all actors have to portray, and I believe that this camera shot allows the audience to see the emotion portrayed by one person, while showing that the other person is listening to them, creating a feeling of a real conversation. Realism is an important part of soaps as the audience has to be able to relate to the settings, characters and stroylines, and face to face interaction is a common occurance in real life.

3 - The third shot shows the setting of one of our scenes, the train station. Scenes from typical soaps like Eastenders and Hollyoaks are usually set in places like pubs or a busy high street, but we decided to challenge this convention as we believed that a train station would be more relevent to the storyline and interesting for the audience as it's somewhere different. A train station is still a busy, public place so it would be possible for many different storylines to come from a setting such as this. Similar to Hollyoaks, it challenges some conventions and by doing so creates a more modern feeling, appealing to a younger audience. It also reflects the kind of activities our target audience does, so they would find it relatable. 

4 - Although my main target audience is 15 - 24, this shot shows that the soap also caters for a younger and older audience. There is a mixture of ages within my soap trailer, because as well as the teenagers included, there is also grandparents and children. We made sure to use a variety of stereotypical characters within our trailer as the audience would be able to give the audience something to relate to, and the characters are similar to those the audience usually see in other soap operas, so they can recognise and link characters for a better understanding.

5 - This image shows a low angle camera shot, where a girl is picking up a bag off the floor. We made sure to use a variety of camera shots and angles throughout our trailer as soaps usually have a lot of different close ups, mid shots and long shots. As well as these types of camera shots, we also decided to use a few non conventional shots like the low angle and high angle shots. This changes up the range of shots and makes it more interesting and exciting for the audience, as they get to see more than just the characters.

6 - This image is of a sonogram of a baby, with the text on screen saying 'New Life'. This relates to our recurring them of 'new', which signifies the soap is a new soap. The text on screen relates to the the theme as well as the many storylines, and so it creates a type of synergy by linking all of the stories together. This also develops on the conventional Hollyoaks title screens, as the text usually appears seperate to the video, but we felt that having the text over the video meant that it would be easier to relate what was happening in the trailer to the text, and also meant more time for the trailer and therefore we could develop the story more.

7 - In this image, there is a young woman holding a child. This image shows the controversial storylines that appear within our soap trailer. Controversy is something that other soaps use conventionally, and will usually attract audiences and catch their attention, so we believed having stereotypical characters would be good, but also having some not so typical characters would cause a lot of talk and debate which in turn would promote the soap. There is the controversy of young teenage mothers, and also a lesbian relationship.

8 - The image is of one of the transitions we used, 'zoom and pan'. This empahsizes how we wanted our trailer in this way to not follow all conventions, and by doing this hopefully making it more modern and exciting. Not a lot of soaps typically use transitions, but I felt that the transition would make the trailer flow better instead of breaking it up with text like soap adverts usually do. However, I felt that the way we edited our trailer kept it fast paced and choppy, as trailers conventionally are. This means that the audiences attention is immediately grabbed and the shorts scenes keep the audience from getting bored.

9 - The last image is of the end sequence, where the channel logo and voiceover appear. Soap operas typically appear on the main channels such as BBC 1, 2, ITV 1 and Channel 4, but we decided to challenge this and so broadcast our soap on the E4 Channel. We felt this would be more appealing to our target audience since teenagers and young adults typically watch comedy programmes and those broadcast on E4, and so we felt this would be a way to capture their attention. Also, we took a type of E4 banner and recreated it to advertise our logo, so in this way we kept the colours and look of the channel.

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