Final Trailer

Our trailer as final product is something we are immensely proud of as a team, purely because of how difficult it was for us to not only get the right type of people involved, but to make it interesting to watch. Because a Soap is based purely on 'normal' people, it was crucial that we had to have a relatively short, yet interesting to watch trailer. Notably, throughout it we made use of a great deal of cutting as we felt that this was the perfect way to maintain an audiences attention. Initially, we attempted to simply upload chunks of film and then merge it together to create a trailer, yet this simply did not work. After watching it back a number of times we discovered that it was simply last lustre to view, and if the trailer is relatively boring, then our target audience would consider the Soap to be. Really, that was our core ideology. We needed to create an artefact that would make people want to make the time to watch The Cross, something we did struggle to do. As previously mentioned, the merging of bulk of film just meant that people were staring at a similar scene for a good 5-10 seconds, which in reality may sound a short amount of time, simply wasn't during the playback, especially when the trailer itself, as shown by codes and conventions is only around 1 minute long.

We shot a good deal of film for the majority of our clips, as of course a logical philosophy would be to shoot too much, and not too little. Because of this, we had a good amount to play with so to speak in terms of the individual clips that we could extract from the material, and then actually place in the final film. For instance, there was an entire scene we shot of a neighbour whom was simply operating around her kitchen while surrounded by members of family. We felt though that the rest of the content simply dragged the trailer out for no reason, as we tried to go for the quality and not quantity recipe. This we felt would be absolutely key to creating an effective Trailer. As typically, if a trailer gets to long, people lose interest, so we felt it would be better to have the trailer around the length of a standard one, but change the style slightly. Arguably the most major problem for us came in the fact that no templates exist. Yes, templates exist of other media, but none of soaps, as such we struggled to an extent to maintain a level of originality, while trying to maintain what we had perceived and understood as the codes and conventions of a soap trailer. Trailers exist online of content from EastEnders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, but the content itself is limited in the fact that the soaps are already established, and are not looking to attract a new audience, simply maintain one. For us of course, we would be seeking to establish one, primarily a younger one that normally targeted by Soaps. As such, we hit a snag so to speak in the fact that we had to be completely original, using logic and intellect to decide what should be in the clip.

Throughout the clip you will notice their is a massive amount of editing that has been done in order to achieve the product, resulting on we consider to be relatively similar to typical codes and conventions, whilst bending them ever so slightly, and maintaining audience attention all at the same time.

The most major change that we have tried to make in terms of codes and conventions is simply the use of handheld camera, rather mounted on a tripod. Initially, we spent a good amount of time considering whether or not to use a tripod for stability, adhering to codes and conventions, or test them to the limit, and not use one. The method behind our madness was really down the fact that we wanted it to be different, but maintain the core founding of a Soap. We considered what we could alter to challenge these, and we hit a wall in the sense that we couldn't alter actual content, or people simply wouldn't understand the fact that it's a Soap. Thus, it came down to the filming of the content itself, resulting in us debating whether or not to use a tripod. We in fact consulted the public for some constructive criticism on what they thought of the trailer being done hald held, with the results being found within our Soap Research. The audience in fact voted against the idea, suggesting that it would stray to far away. However, we took a chance, and we're pretty pleased with the outcome, as it wasn't easy to shoot, nor edit. As a whole though, we wouldn't change a massive amount, other that potentially the diversity of the characters. We tried greatly to get a good range of ages, and cultures, but we were limited on a contact level, and the ability to arrange filming times.