Second Draft Editing Complete

The editing of my latest draft is now complete, I looked at some viewer feedback from my first draft, we showed the soap trailer to a class of year 10s and 11s. This age group is the lower end of the spectrum for our soap, some quotes from the class are: 

'Lacks pace in the beginning' 

'More Dissolves/ Fades' 

'Thought it was a music video' 

When the focus group was asked to raise there hands if they would watch the soap, around 12 of the 26 students raised there hands, a straight 6/6 with boys and girls. We were happy with this percentage, however, we wanted to attract more than this, so to improve my soap, taking on the advise from one of the students I removed/ edited around 7 seconds from the opening two scene, I also synchronised and matched the lyrics of the song to the scene for additional effect. 

I also added some extra fades and dissolves as opposed to straight cuts within different camera angles in the same scene, for example, in the scene which shows Michael 'The Geek' and Me 'The love triangle' character, I used a cut, but I used a screen dissolve which created a good and coherent transition as it looked very scientific and abstract, which portrayed the character in the scene.

Finally, from the advise of the focus group, I added voice-over audio on an overlay of the music to make it clear that it wasn't a music video, I also added 'Coming Soon...' at the beginning of the trailer, I feel this will also make the viewer more intrigued on first viewing. The addition of voice-over which were asynchronous, non-diagetic voices of the characters who were on camera, I felt this gave more insight into the characters persona, especially as our trailer has no diagetic speech from the characters, the voice-overs were also conducted by the characters themselves, so when the soap begins or another trailer/ interview is released/ oiccurs, they will already recognise the character. 

The voice-overs are: 

'Sometimes I wonder whether our love is worth the abuse we get' 

'You're such a freak' 

'She'll never love me' 

These show three different persona's linked around the same semantic field of love, we did this to link to our soaps tagline 'There's two sides to every story'. 

With the editing of the soap, I ensured that the two sides were shown, for example: David Bangs is shown as a drunken, obnoxious man when making the homosexual couple cry, but in the opening scene, you also see that he is looking at a picture of his child and the text 'Drink away your sorrows...' appears and fades away, but to the homosexual couple, he is just a drunken man with no reason for his drinking, this is a factor we wanted to draw upon within the soap.