2. 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)
3. I have picked out the most useful feedback
answers from each question to look at
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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.
11. 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’
12. 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)
13. 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.
14. 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.
15. This was very informal so I had just taken notes
about what people thought of my ancillary texts.
16. 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
17. 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
