Trailer:
I believe that my group's trailer is a success. We made sure it appealed to or target audience, we are confident the music and scenes merged together successfully to build up suspense and mystery. In the editing we made sure we had no jump cuts and that the shots flowed from one to the next. We done this with fades and dissolves in between scenes. I feel that the content of our trailer is what keeps our audience interested. There are notes being found everywhere and the audience are determined to find out what they mean. The main strength of our soap is that the audience are interested and involved in what is happening within the trailer. My audience feedback (from facebook) has shown me that the use of the notes was mysterious to them, but when the meaning was revealed, "we know what you did" became a tag line which stuck.Although all this is good, there are some weaknesses for our trailer. For one, it is too long. Most trailers only last around 30-40 seconds, whilst ours is over 2 minutes. Another is that some of our audience did not understand the meaning of the trailer straight away because the notes were found in a different order. If we could do it again, I would change the order in which the notes are received and try cut down the trailer, without missing out important information.
Website:
Last year we didn't need to make a website for our Thriller opening, so when we were asked to make a soap website, we didn't know where to start. We were taken to the CLC where we were taught how to use a programme called 'iWeb' on the Macs. I picked up how to use this quickly and was able to go back to school and help to produce a group website. The research we had completed on already established soap's websites helped us alot in what we needed to include. We made sure that it appealed to our target audience. We done this by using neutral colours so it would neither appeal to one sex or one age. During the process of making this website, we encountered some problems that we couldn't eliminate. When we added a new page, the name of the page appeared in the navigation at the top. For example, we wanted to add and external page called 'Andrea's Diary' but we did not want this to appear on our main page, but a link from the characters page. We had to rename the pages like dots (.. or ...) so the names didn't appear on the main page. This was a weakness that we couldn't overcome.Magazine Cover:
At first, me and my group decided to make a magazine cover which looked like 'Radio Times' so it looked better. In the end, after some trouble, we all converted back to the original conventional soap magazine cover. I managed to make this on a programme called 'PhotoImpact'. It looks very professional and conventional, but the weakness of this task was that I took too long to find a suitable programme to make my final piece. I used another 3 programmes before I found this programme which suited me best.I believe my three products link together well because the main concepts of them are all based on the same storyline. The main page of the website is based on the content of the trailer, and my magazine cover also has the soap's storyline as the main picture. We made sure all our tasks were pretty much the same by working together and making our work thorough.
If I were to complete this whole coursework task again, I would not have tried to film an extract from an episode, as this took up a whole day of filming which we did not actually use. Also I would have stuck to a programme I knew how to use for my magazine cover, and I would change the main picture from three characters to one of just the murdered character. For the website, I would have liked to add more pages and have more time to experiment with the features to try and make our website look as good and authentic as possible.
