Final Draft of Magazine Front Cover

I designed my magazine front cover based on the 'Radio Times' i believe that it looked lot more proffesional and still targeted a variety of age groups. I felt that this best emphasized our soap, leaving it to look more professional and most importantly watchable.

For the design of my front cover, i used photoshop.

I used different colour schemes and fonts, i finally found the font i felt best suited my design and the most beneficial colour.

I experimented many times creating many rough drafts, id finally found what id wanted and i used a tool which made the background look asif it had been drawn, this helped target at the younger audience.

I also advertised the fact that it was a new soap and went against the idea of promoting the first big story line of 'MURDER' and instead stuck with a critics comment.

Pictures from Filming Day Two

Group Filming Day Two

Saturday 23rd January 2010

Today we began filming for the trailer of our soap. Thegla, Natalie M and I met together early and organised set, we set up the camera and the microphone, altered the lighting and organised the props.

From the last filming day being less organised that we had hoped, this time around we typed up all the shots we needed etc (on the blog above)

After everything was sorted on set we got together and went through the plan, we decided to do all the over the shoulder shots first, then allow time for Thegla to prepare to get in character and cry for the reaction shots and close ups. We again managed to get numerous shots from many different angles so that when we are at the editing stage we would not be limited in our choices.

So we got filming, the over the shoulder shots where the hardest, we had to make sure we never moved anything/ or placed things back in the right place before filming again. We had the slight problem with Thegla sometimes moving in front of the camera but we filmed this take so many times there are still many to pick from. Some of the shots we experimented with where: Zoom, close-up shots, over the shoulder shots , panning shots , wide shots, reaction shots.

Me and Natalie M took it in turns to film and to hold up the microphone to which we attached to a pole in order to get closer to out actor and it not pick up our own movement.

With the lighting we used the daylight to our advantage, in the close up scenes the daylight lighted up half of Thegla's face really adding to quality of the picture as well as the emotional effect we was aiming for.

Some problems we experienced was with the text on the phone, it came up very small and the camera found it hard to focus, so we came up with the idea of taking a picture of it from the newspaper and leaving it widescreen.

We also changed the plan slightly, mixing up the order Thegla finds the notes leaving the audience more questionable and confused.

Overall today was extremely successful, we covered everything we needed to and there where no problems throught filming.

Reflection on Focus Group

As a group we decided on completing the final focus group. However, although this was more successful than our pilot focus group, it still didn't benefit us as much as we had hoped it would.
Our group consisted of 5 people aged between 17 and 18. They were of both genders (3 girls and 2 boys). We decided on this age group as it is our primary target audience. we started off by reading out our pitch to them, then followed by our treatment, and a rough outline of our trailer and website.

Here are the questions we asked and the most common answers:

1. Does the different approach we have, in terms of the trailer being based on one individual character and storyline, affect your perception of our soap?- no, it makes you want to watch it more, it wont confuse the audience
2. Does the trailer sound like a typical soap opera trailer, would you be inclined to watch this soap over another, already existing trailer?- it sounds more like a drama
3. With the time of the soap being 8pm, Tuesday to Thursday, would you watch this?- yes
4. How does the fact that we have a huge storyline in our first episode affect you?- it gets straight to the point
5. Are there any other comments regarding our soap?- no

After we had asked them the questions as a group we had a quick meeting to discuss how successful we think it went. The responses we received didn't benefit us as much as we thought and we have decided to re-do the exercise later on with different group of people.

My Photoshop Practice

I decided to pick one of the pictures we took, and attempt on using photoshop. i experimented with different styles of font and colour.
Im going to use my skills i have gained to help me with designing my own TV guide cover. I like the idea of it being black and white with the red lips and jacket being highlighted; we wore red clothing because it symbolised danger and it also showed us to be on one side.

Magazine ideas

On our first filming day, we took a number of photo ideas for our magazine.

-I used phtoshop to make some of them black and white to experiment on different approaches.

However, before we got used to thecold, and mastered staying in the same position for a few more seconds then we had liked we took a few pictures, which didnt prove to be as succesful.

You can see in the picture on the Left that there is a gap in between me and Natalie N, we all look fairly cold in both pictures so we decided to carry on taking more till we was all happy.

Minutes for Sixth group meeting

Discussions on General filming and ideas

Wednesday 1st December 2009

Start time: 11:00am

People present: Elena Christodoulou, Thegla Savvides and Natalie Nicolaides

• Planning ideas for our magazine covers.
• we went through all the pictures and each chose our own.
• We planned another day that we are going to meet up for filming, and we also discussed the editing process. We are planning to meet up this sunday to organise the film we have and which shots we are going to use. where then going to draw out another storyboard to make sure everything fits together perfectly and that we have enough shots for the editing stage.
• We also spoke about the music, what kind of music, theme tune we are aiming for..catchy,singing, lyrics...

Finish Time: 11:40am