Matthew Tildesley's A2 Media Coursework Blog

Friday 23 March 2012

Matthew Tildesley, Candidate Number 4891, The Grove Finished

Using other soap opera trailers/scenes such as Eastenders and other, our group decided to use a car crash as the main dramatic narrative point but we couldn't film a car crashing so we decided to use a shot of someone in the car as if they were dead or unresponsive like this scene/preview in Eastenders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRV9X0wz2Kg

The use of a car in my trailer is affective as the auidence's attention is grabbed due to hidden causes or who did it although we also decided to show someone messing with the car by filming someone underneath it without showing the face it created mystery and storyline that audiences want to follow everynight until they know who did it and why. We also shot a low shot of two people exchanging money just be showing the hands and the money, this again created a sense of tension because the audience wants to know if the money has anything to do with the car crash.

We also wanted to add emotion and drama by having the teenage/young adult in the car to have a pregnant girlfriend who finds out by a phone call but I decided to leave the phone call out, to create more tension, so by just showing the phone ring but you can't see the number, the auidence question how it links to the car crash such as if someone is ringing up to tell her the bad news or if they are going to threaten the girl aswell. Doing this adds even more to the conventions of a soap opera where they make a story last over 3-6 episodes with cliffhangers or cutting the story at the end so the auidence will have to watch the next one to find out what happens next.

Then we took two other storylines/narratives that have somewhat similar themes such as someone walking into someone cheating or finding out. We decided to do something like this from eastenders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f949uafKpCc, we thought the way this was done would be too time consuming so we decided to have the girlfriend and the person she is having an affair with walk to the door and hug while at the same time her boyfriend walks into the house only to find them, we thought it would be to typical to have a boyfriend cheating on his girlfriend so we swapped it around to not follow the stereotypical narrative. This was really affective as we used it to end the trailer as another storyline like a cliffhanger to the trailer, where the auidence is once again caught by tension to find out what happens next and how these characters will react.

The main difference with my trailer and existing soap operas that deal with the issues is that my trailer has non diegtic music playing underneath the trailer, this was used to give it more of a teenager/young adult auidence feel to it as with Eastenders where the trailers have little or no music to make the soap serious and gritty for the impact of getting attention from parents/older people. The song chosen for my soap opera trailer for 'The Grove' was to add emphasis to the narratives of love/broken hearts which was affective as most of the narratives followed this idea. Using Lacan's theory of mirroring is affective as the music shows and represents the main characters of the storyline not as a copy device but as if the trailer copies the general stereotype of how people dress and lets them relate to the program.

Overall using similar or different conventions from different trailers/scenes made my trailer unquie in its approach to grasp and relate to the target audience its created for.

Front Cover Redone and Improved

My new front cover, from the last one I realised that the images and text where okay they either clashed or made the front cover look to full without any explantion. So I redid it and used mostly the same images but looked at a different magazine and used it as a start off point. I kept the masthead that I had done as it was effective and conveyed the look of one. I used photoshop to give my magzine front cover a better feel and added halos around character and add backgrounds to green screen images. And again had the trailer/front cover and poster link with the main narrative of the characters Max and Sophie (Me and Ellen).

This is my poster for a billboard, as you can see I used the whole introducing every character to the audience by having all the main characters in the scene, I then as the Skins poster used the the main focus/narrative to decided which characters would be at the front, by having everyone in near enough the same clothes, it fitted in with the trailer and front cover.

The First Billboard Poster I Did was good but was to photoshopped and felt to unreal and stepped out of relation to the characters, so I decided to replace the whole background to a normal brick wall and then moved to the title of soap to where the new series was as it fitted in more and I could make the characters bigger in the image.

Using the storylines, we had everyone who was in the same storyline together and had them create the feel of emotion such as Ellen's devotation to me with her looking up at me, this gives the audience the narrative of our story/trailer/soap.

This is the poster I based mine off, I found it useful as all the characters are introduced and by what they are wearing and doing conveys their character and characteristics, the only thing I did't like about the poster was the yellow background as it displayed childish qualites and I wanted my poster to look a bit more serious so I decided to use a different background.

The magazine I based my front cover off to make it look like a real one.

Using the conventions and media to make the magazine and appeal to people such as Masthead, Close ups and Images.

I decided to make a Masthead like the one on this front cover aswell as taking the whole yellow,red,white colour scheme which makes the magazine look colourful

Question 1 Part 1

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Question 1 Part 2

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Question 2

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Question 3

Listening to peoples comments on my trailer showed the main concern was that my trailer needed to have one sound level for music while the actors were talking in the scenes.

Going back and looking at the scene with Me and Ellen after listening to Irina saying it needs to be shown more as a flashback. So I tweaked the saturation to give it a dreamy white look, like someone. This created a clearer representation of a flashback which was effective as it gives the auidence a backgroud/relationship for the character of the main narrative of the trailer.

Listening to Jack's point of how the sometimes the sounds clash I went back to iMovie and changed and tuned to the sound levels so voices would be clearer, but I also wanted to get rid of as much background noise such as wind so I went onto the sound options and changed how much background noise was heard. Doing this made it easier to understand the story lines /narrative.

I also went onto Keynote and made a title cards to add emphasis to the main narrative of the trailer and made it look more animated by adding effects to make it feel more like a E4 teenager/ young aldut soap opera trailer.