Conor Reed

For our soap trailer’s 1st Draft, I gathered answers to a questionnaire which I did in person with people from our target audience (right).

For some relatively informal feedback in-between this draft and the final trailer I just asked some people what they thought about new aspects of it.

For the final Product I used the same questionnaire again (Without Q5)

I have picked out the most useful feedback

answers from each question to look at

This was a problem which our group was concerned about from the beginning of our project whether it’d be clear that it was in fact a soap trailer. Clearly as we haven’t put music in yet, it isn’t clear enough what type of trailer this is, but it can be made clearer by:

• Clearing up the transitions between characters and the slow crime scene to make it obvious which is which.

• Showing the relationship between characters more in their showcases.

• Showing more stock narratives etc.

This was helpful information for us, because as the creators of the trailer we already knew what scene was what and didn’t realise there was any confusion. We went over a few ways that it could be helped to make it clearer where we were. The main thing you have to worry about is when the voice is diagetic and non diagetic which now (as we have re-shot one of the scenes) is clearer because you know who/what’s at the scene and what isn’t.Also the addition of music highlights which parts are the action packed character sequences and which are the slow paced crime scene reveal scenes.

This is very good news for us as the creators of the soap that the trailer is for. To make these characters we looked at some of the stock characters used in other soap operas such as EastEnders and Hollyoaks. Some of the characters we came up with are listed on my question 1 blog post answer.

As far as some being ‘unexplained’ this is simply because the trailer doesn’t give us enough time to give every characters context and full story. As a compromise we decided to make use of enigma code and get the audience asking questions about who these characters really are.

We are aware of this, as we have already scheduled a re-shoot which will be all together slightly different for the mentioned scene. The reason for tis was because of us using the steadicam with very little practice. The steadicam is a piece of equipment which smooth's the movement of the camera when used, although because we were amateurs with it, our movement became wobbly and ill composed.In preparation for our reshoot, we have had some more practice with the steadicam and have re-thought our shot so we only walk backwards which was the smoothest direction last time.

This idea of ‘Character Themes’ was very interesting which we hadn’t actually considered for the addition of music. This allows us to actually further show the individual personalities of each character and show the difference between their showcases and the slow walking scene in between them. To look for some music we went to ‘Incompetech’ which is a creative commons music (and graph paper) website. It uses a very helpful ‘Mood Search’ which lets you enter what feel you want the music to have (suspenseful, intense, bouncy etc.) which is great for finding four tracks for very different personalities.

This information was just reassurance that we had in fact targeted our audience correctly. To successfully make our trailer look like a BBC Three official trailer, we had to do some research into other adverts and trailers by BBC Three such as ‘Uncle’, ‘Being Human’ and ‘Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents’. Although these programmes don’t have much in common with our crime soap, we are only looking for the BBC Three style of advert which we found to have a BBC Three logo in the bottom left corner and at the end shows the title of the soap with the logo with the HD symbol and the social networking information for twitter @bbcthree on a black screen.

We are aware that the trailer is very long at the moment and needs to be cut down to about half the length. Firstly we are re-shooting a lot of the footage to allow us to pace it all up a bit with faster cuts and therefore shorter character sequences. We are also going to cut down the slow scenes to only show what is necessary to get the voiceover out of the way before the next character sequence. We think making the trailer cut together faster and increasing the pace will better reflect the mood we are looking for from our trailer.

We overlooked this in the first draft as the information at the end of the trailer was forgotten until deadline day (admittedly poor time management there) so we just wrote something to tie up the end of the trailer. We can appreciate why it needs to be changed for a number of reasons:• The work ‘Soap’ isn’t the official term for what

we have made, but it is the publicly recognised one. To use professional terminology it would say ‘Weekly Drama’

• Soap operas are commonly thought to be feminine, and we want to target a male audience, so we should avoid the word ‘soap’

This was done just before the deadline so we had

some time to make a few last minute changes

(A lot of this is just reassurance that we have been

successful with our changes)

This was the feedback we were looing for at this

stage (believe it or not) so it shows us that the

addition of music and re-cutting our trailer has

really cleared up for some people what this

programme actually is.

We did look for a song to use over the crime

scene which could be re-ouccuring as our ‘jingle’

but it didn’t fit the mood of our programme AND

contrast enough with the other music used in the

character sequences. We were very happy with

the music chosen as it successfully shows the

contrasting personalities of the different featured

characters.

This was very informal so I had just taken notes

about what people thought of my ancillary texts.

Good use of the

BBC Three

Style

Nice editing of

the character

Better way to highlight ‘The Freak’ (improvement on my 1st Draft)

Well composed

image

Well placed

programme info

Well thought out

colour scheme

for the poster

genre

Kept to Soaplife

style

Own

photography on

sub stories

Lighting

relatively similar

for convincing

cover photo

Catchy headine

Bold colours

used in the

Soaplife layout