How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

Research and Construction

We put all of our research on to our own individual websites which we created through Yolasite.com. This website enables you to create your own website and it’s really straight forward and simple. I think it was a good idea to use this website as it was efficient, easy to use and looked like a real website. There were never any problems getting onto the website either. All of our research is on our own websites; some of the research we undertook was analysing current soap opera trailers, analysing an episode of Hollyoaks, researching typical storylines and characters etc.

When researching ideas for our trailers we used television and watched all kinds of different trailers to see what information needs to be given to the audience to ‘sell’ a show. We didn’t just look at soap opera trailers, we also looked at other tv programme trailers that we knew our target audience would watch such as skins, shameless, desperate housewives etc.The four main soaps we looked at were Hollyoaks, Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. In these trailers we saw cliff hangers, cutting stories before finding the truth, realistic characters and settings. We focused our attention on Hollyoaks and Eastenders trailers because they were the nearest to our target audience. As well as television we looked on Youtube.com and official websites of soap operas to get a variety of trailers ranging from special edition episodes or Christmas episodes to just general episodes with big storylines. We also had a look at some soap magazines like TV Weekly to see what sorts of storylines are revealed.

We knew what our target audience wanted because we made Vox pops; we went around our school and asked random people from all ages and genders what soap operas they like, what they didn’t like, who their favourite characters were etc. If they said they didn’t watch soap operas then we asked them why not. We filmed them on a videocamera and then put them on Windows Movie Maker and then on to Youtube. We also did our own individual questionnaires and analysed them, the results can be seen on our own websites. As a class we did a focus group which was really helpful as everyone was able to put in their own thoughts and opinions as well as discussing ideas we had for our trailers; this can be seen on our own websites. As a group once we had come up with our ideas we pitched them to our class; we decided to do it in a form of a flipchart presentation which can be seen on our websites. We also individually created a Facebook group about soap operas and asked people to just leave general comments about their thoughts and opinions they had about current and existing soap operas. This was successful and helpful as many different people left a variety of comments. 

Planning and Creation

When planning our soap opera trailer we did a brainstorm about ideas, characters and storylines we wanted to use, names etc. Once we had decided on these we created a storyboard on paper and drew the characters and scenes and what they would say. We then created a scene schedule in more detail – we simply noted what characters we needed in each scene, where it would take place, what they would say and what props would be needed if any. After finishing that we typed up our scripts on word document and then gave our cast the final script. We found out their availability by using the database on our school computer and printing off their timetables. We then cross referenced their free periods with our free periods and noted down all the free periods that we had at the same time. Texts and emails were then sent out to arrange and confirm filming times. This was very handy as we were working with a low budget, non professional crew so we had to work with what we got.  Although these people were our friends, they had their own lives and commitments so we had to work around them. At times it was hard and frustrating working with un-professional actors as the quality of acting wasn’t always that amazing and a lot of times they messed around.

From our scene schedule we prioritised the scenes in order of which scenes were most important and the main ones we would definitely need. We didn’t film the scenes in order as we didn’t need to because we would just be able to edit them later and put them in order. We filmed each scene about three or four times to get a range of different shots and angles. We then used Final Cut Express on the MAC to edit. To begin with it was quite difficult to get the hang of the programme as I was quite new to it but once I knew what I was doing it was quite easy. All our filming was one big file so I had to cut out all the good parts and take out the parts we wouldn’t be using. After I had got all the scenes we wanted to use I had to render everything which was highly annoying as it was time consuming and had to be done several times. After that, I moved around the scenes to make sure it all flowed and added the music. I then had to render a few things some more and make sure everything fitted in with the music.

When creating our ancillary texts, we made posters and the cover of a soap magazine. We used Adobe Photoshop for this by taking photos of our cast and editing them using various ‘effects’ on the programme. We thought the best publicity would be posters; we can put them up any where, especially schools. There aren’t many posters that soaps used for publicity that we could work from, however we just tried to make our own individual touch. The creation of our posters can be seen on our websites.When making the magazine cover we literally just looked at existing ones on the internet, and Google images to get some ideas for what we needed to include. We also looked back at our old magazine covers that we had created to see what worked and didn’t work as much. At the end of the day they are both advertising so they can be similar.

For our official website we looked at other competing soap opera websites to see what features they have e.g. FEEDBACK, COMPETITIONS, QUIZ, FAQ, CAST etc. Again we used Yola site as we knew how to use it. However we found that it didn’t look very professional; its quite simplistic for an official website as although it looks okay for our planning and research we felt that it didn’t stand out much against other official soap opera websites. We used Adobe Photoshop to create pages and images so they could layer nicely instead of looking like they have been placed together in blocks. This made it easier to place writing on top of pictures to make it look more artistic. 

Evaluation

For our evaluation, Amanda and I simply videoed each other talking into the camera about the whole process we went through when creating our soap opera trailer. Just like our soap opera trailer, we then uploaded these videos onto the Mac and edited them on final cut express. We then exported the videos onto my USB, uploaded them onto YouTube and then copy and pasted the embedded code into a HTML box on our evaluation website. Although this sounds like a simple straightforward process, at times it was quite hard. When uploading our vidoes we had to spend some time editing them, and before uploading them onto youtube we had to convert the files into WMV. types. We did this by downloading a free converter off the internet called "WINFF" which itself was simple to use but quite time consuming. Once all the video files had been converted they were then uploaded onto youtube. However some of the vidoes failed at first because there were over ten minutes so we had to re-edit them and put them into different parts. Some videos also took longer to upload than others for example one video took nearly three hours to upload whilst another was done within twenty minutes.