1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our soap trailer used, developed and challenged the forms and conventions of real media products.
A soap trailer almost always features continuous story lines, narratives, dealing with domestic themes and personal or family relationships. We predominantly adhered to these conventions as we imagine that our soap will have have these features, in addition, our trailer followed many dramatic story lines through one point of view. Secondly, British soaps most often feature common, ordinary, working class characters in which we also did as our main character came from a working class background. Additionally, just like real soaps we aimed for realism in order to maintain a believable tone to our trailer. Furthermore, it will it will undoubtedly end with a cliff hanger with a tense and suspenseful, unfinished piece of dialogue or action. We also followed this convention as we ended the trailer in a zoom in to a traumatised face.

Despite following these conventions, we also developed a few, for example, special effects are not used in soaps in order to maintain realism, however we use transitions to manipulate time, which we thought was essential as it effectively engaged the audience and created a division.

Our camera work challenged conventions of camera work in soap trailers as they mainly keep the camera work simple in order to keep it realistic. However, we used camera work to portray authority, for example, when the teacher is shouting at the vulnerable character we used a high angle shot to give the teacher a powerful, judgemental position, whereas the student is seen as weak and insecure.

British soaps tend to have a strong regional identity to attract viewers from that area and often are deeply community based. Our genre was an urban soap opera trailer, so we set it in west London, which connotes a grimy dangerous location. It was also set in school which is where the "community" is based.

British soaps deal with controversial issues such as drugs, teenage pregnancies and racism, however our issues were not that extreme as it discussed issues that represent teenage struggles like bullying.

Conventions create expectations from the audience, they expect to see real issues and familiar locations, if these are broken then the audience are disappointed or shocked therefore we occasionally subverted these conventions to keep the audience engaged.
Our trailer followed conventions as it consisted of multiple narratives and a non linear structure. However, unlike the Eastenders trailer it was not hyper-dramatised, Roxy and Ronnies' arrival was exaggerated to make them seem more appealing to the audience which could be argued to be misleading. We did not use this aspect of conventions because we did not want to create a false narrative because our storyline was already complex and we felt that we did not need to make it better because it was already very engaging. In addition, in the Eastenders trailer there was a sense of self parody when Stacey is portrayed as a cleaner, though we decided not to mock our characters so that the audience takes the characters seriously and make the trailer more realistic.

Overall , our trailer consisted of characters that we feel represented west London well and were conventional of existing soap trailers.

In terms of existing TV magazines, we think we predominantly followed the conventions as we agreed that the TV magazines we analysed were very successful in term of engaging the audience. Therefore, we decided to have a very similar layout to the one we studied. Our cover was dominated by photographic images of the three main protagonists, this attracts the audience attention and help gain any potential viewers. Existing TV mags use bright colours, bold font and large images on their covers, with vivid shapes consisting of eye-catching phrases. We used these effective methods in order to create a similar tone to our magazine and hence adhered to the conventions of TV magazines.

Soap posters are fairly uncommon however there are many TV drama posters in which we thought were successful. We felt that the posters we analysed portrayed urban London through colours and effects; they used a grey background which reflects the show. We felt that this was exceptionally effective so we also decided to give our poster this effect.