Minutes of Meeting - Focus group

Monday 22nd March 2010

08.45am-9.45am

Present - Maria Alexiou, Sinthuja Tacks and Tamika Smith

Abesent - None

It was important to hold a group meeting to discuss our current process and what improvements we have to make to current posts. In order to do this we produced a table with the titles of Completed, in progress and not yet done. After recording the progress of important posts we then evaluated whether the posts are effective or require some re-drafting.

This research enabled us to understand that we have to re-draft the current risk assessment that we made as we have not completed the risks and hazards that we had to consider when filming our trailer. We were also able to understand that we needed to take some extra cast photographs which will then use for evaluation purposes and for our website. We also identified that we must research into soap websites and begin the production of our soap.

We completed our trailer for our soap. It was important to gain some final feedback before deciding on the final cut. We felt it was important to show the trailer to some members of our focus group, this is because they are our target audience and we value there suggestions.

The review below is from Nathan which is a member of our focus group.

I think the trailer is pretty good, the first couple of storylines are very clear and easy to get the jist of, Soap is set in Edmonton (good use of the train station). Sinthuja is reminded of what seems to be her ex-lover Philip and is upset about it, there is one small bit where it looks like shes about to cut herself that bit is like so quick happens in a flash you should get rid of that bit and just make it Sinthuja holding the knife edging it closer to her wrist.

Next storyline is the character finding out their pregnant that's cool but you make a shocked face, surely if you were doing a pregnancy test already you had a feeling you were pregnant you wouldn't be that shocked. Then the whole "where's my money scene" i didn't 100% get, because in the trailer the two characters seem to have nothing to do with each other then all of a sudden they have a history. Apart from that everything is great. Subtitles are good. Also the soundtrack is amazing, dramatic but yet sad track which relates to all the storylines in one way or another.

We also gained feedback from Ryan who is another member of our focus group.

The narrative seems clear and it feels real to me which is something that is not shown in all soaps on at the moment. I think the black pages explain what is going on in the trailer which is good if some watchers don't understand. I think that scene of Michael being stabbed should not been in the trailer as it gives too much away, the audience want surprises not everything explained. I think the locations are very realistic and the transitions work well with the filming. The editing was done well.

The results from our focus group are very important. They have enabled us to think of issues that we hadn't realised ourselves. I feel gaining these results now was a good idea because we can then edit the product again for a final time with the input from our target audience and focus group. We have decided that we will cut the scene of Michael getting stabbed as this will explain our main storyline early on which will not give audiences something to be surprised by. We also decided that we will change the text on one of the subtitles as it can be seen that we are explaining the narratives too clearly and not leaving room for speculation or mystery. The final change we will make is to extend the pregnancy scene showing a upset facial expression rather than a shocked face as we have taken on board what Ashley expressed that the character would already have suspicions that she is pregnant.

Conducting a focus group meeting has allowed us to understand on what audiences expect to find from our soap opera. We will then make the final cut to our soap trailer. The next post will express what was changed along with a final copy of the trailer.