Throughout the course of our project we had to take a major element into account regarding our design and creation process, audience. The audience is essentially everything that our project is about, and without it, our project effectively has no meaning, or for that matter; purpose.
We went through a number of stages so that we could create 3 effective products that in reality would be very much the pinnacle of what our audience would want, by obeying the already constructed codes and conventions of our individual artefacts.
In regards to our Poster we likewise to the trailer felt that it was imperative for us to 'get it right' in a manner of speaking. Typically our audience would be looking for a clear representation of what our Poster is depiciting. It would be irrelevant for us to create a Poster for a brand new Soap that is yet to be established and give it a theme of horror or a thriller as that would diverge to far away from the already established codes and conventions, resulting in a product that would almost be seen as a novelty rather than an intelligent depiction of our product. In order to carry this out effectively we had to gather a number of opinions upon our product ideas, taking into consideration what the audience found attractive regarding design and what they did not. As a start, we wanted to maintain a certain level of control over the design process of our artefcts to give them a sense of originality and personification, despite this core ideology we did still of course need to take into account a number of critical comments such as the fact that we originally made the poster itself far to dark in terms of hue and overall colour use. The poster itself acts as a form of advertisation for the Soap as a whole and by having a dark theme to the poster we were straying to far away from codes and conventions and thus were creating a product that wasn't what we desired, nor was something that an audience would look into viewing. Another comment we recieved was to do with the image we used in that it was simply a picture of our subjects on an artificial background that we created using computer software. After listening to the comment we looked more heavily into the styles used by posters as a whole as we felt that we had focussed to heavily upon just film posters, rather than looking at posters as a group. We looked into methods used to create posters, such as the terminology itself and created a tick list of what would need to be included in order for to product to adhere codes and conventions of soap trailers. Initially we struggled to find any examples of posters for Soap as of course Soaps like that of Coronotation Street and EastEnders have been around for longer than 25 years as the original posters used are hard to come by. Due to this dilema we had to improvise to an extent in terms of what we would make the poster look like. We required it to be an icon of the Soap itself, much like the Queen Vic is to EastEnders and the Rovers Return is to Coronation Street. We ultimately created a questionaire regarding what sort of icnography should be used to represent The Cross, with choices such as 'A meeting place' a 'Character' and simply an 'object' being giving as potential answers. Eventually it was clear that a meeting place was going to be the key theme thanks to input from critics. As such we chose to use an image of a pub within Ashley Cross as the center of the 'square' as we nicknamed it. The pub itself denotes simply a meeting place where patrons and members of the soap can go and releax, however a deeper connotation regards it as being a location in which members of the soap develop deeper bonds with each other and potentially a place where further story lines can take place.
In a similar respect to that of the Soap Trailer and the Poster we required a lot of criticism from the public and critics in order for us to achieve the quintessential representation of a Listings Magazine. A major issue we had regarding the Listings Magazine was to do with the fact that it woudln't just include photos of members of the Soap, and would include photos of people from other TV programmes and articles contained within the magazine. As such we tried to think of a way to get around this problem, whilst maintaing suitability, and adhering to codes and conventions of Listing Magazines. Initially we tried to remove all other images of the Listings Magazine and just leave the core image of the Soap featured, as a form of direct advertisation. We intended this to create a sense of importance regarding the Soap, in that the company behind the Listings Magazine, or, us, would be that willing to remove all other advertisation purely for this once programme. In theory this would work, however it would run the risk of looking like the Radio Times which is essentially a niché Listings Magazine. We then asked for input from the public, who disagreed with the removal of other advertisation for the magazine. We took this completely into account and decided that the removal of images would indeed be disastrous for the LM as it wouldn't follow typical codes and conventions of a Listings Magazine, and only LM's such as the Radio Times can get away with it as they have been around for well over 70 years. Our product of course doesn't even technically exist in the publishing world and therefore may come accross as being to opposed to codes and conventions thus resulting in a seemingly lack luster and poor quality product, where it looks like we have simply been too lazy to include other textual references. We notably took a lot of criticism in regards to our font choice as we felt this was one key area that we needed to get spot on as it would be one of the first elements of the Listings Magazine that you will see and as such as high importance as it potentially could decide whether or not they even continue looking at the Listings Magazine let alone purchase a copy and take interest in our Soap.
Essentially, Ashley Cross needed to be popular with our audience as it needed to be an icon for a soap. Our audience represent a group of people that would theoretically be viewing the soap and as such we needed to take their word as paramount, while trying to bend codes and conventions to an exent in order for us to create a more original product. Our trailer itself for instance features a large amount of people under the age of 25 as we attempted to create a more youth inspired Soap in a bid to try and bend codes and coventions without going to far. We have maintained the core codes and conventions of Soap trailer which we established after asking a group of people what they think the most important part of a Soap is, notably not including the characters ages, and more about their personality and the typical archetypes. Soap location was the most important aspect of our research as we needed somewhere that would mirror the current layour of a Soap Opera. For instance, it was imperative that we chose a location for our Soap trailer that suited the typical format used in already established Soap Operas such as Coronation Street, EastEnders and Emmerdale. For us to find out what was the best location for us to film in, we did an extensive search of nearby areas so that we could ultimately find a location that was a somewhat mirror of the typical layour of previously said soaps. Take for example EastEnders, which is set in a square fashion with a local meeting spot the Queen Vic as the center of attention, with other places such as a launderette, and a café dotted around in a circle fashion. This effectively creates a sense of hierarchy within the square of which locations are the most important, and are thus placed in more reachable locations, to an extent. As such, it was vital for us to follow a similar course when filming our trailer, eventually deciding to place it within an area known as Ashley Cross. The pub we chose to use as a primary meeting point was the Britannia which we made the decision of ourselves. In a similar manner we chose not to ask for input from the public in reagrds to the actual storyline of the Soap trailer as we believed that although they might have some interesting ideas, due to them being exposed to Soaps in a non-analytical way the ideas themselves may not be original enough and not bend the codes and conventions in a way that we had hoped.
No comments:
Post a Comment