Group Planning: Equipment

In order to create our soap we used both hardware and software in order to capture sound, footage, and edit our material to complete our soap trailer. This was an important part of our project as much of the software which I used within the stages of editing helped to challenge soap opera conventions. Below is the equipment which we used to create our soap trailer and why.
 
iTunes:
We used iTunes in order to obtain a sound track for our soap. After searching for a suitable soundtrack for our drug scene in the trailer we chose; The Prodigy - Firestarter.  The key reason for this is because it competes with Hollyoaks, as they too use diegetic sound through the use of soundtracks within their soap, which avoids soap opera sound conventions.

Apple Final Cut Pro:
I used 'Final Cut Pro' to edit our raw footage for the soap. It was a good program to use as it supports HD audio and footage. It was a good software to use and where I found the theme song w have used for our soap, it also provided good wide-range of editing tools which is mentioned in the post: 'Group Planning: Editing Techniques'.







Apple Mac Book Pro:
For editing our footage we used 'Apple Mac Book Pro', we used this hardware as it supported the HD footage which we had captured. It was also very good for editing as it had many features and was easy use.

Olympus Voice Recorder:
Our group used a voice recorder in order to record a voice other. Our voice over was a tag question (how would you solve your issues?), this was used in order to attract the target audience to watch the soap. Voice overs are non-diegtic sounds which often appear on many soap trailers as they are used to inform the audience what time and channel the soap is being aired.


Video Camera (Sony HD Handycam):
We used this camera to capture footage in HD, it also captures HD audio however we did not want to include any dialogue within our soap trailer as we planned to use title screens in order to show what was happening on screen. We have also used this camera to take photos of locations and actors which we have used within our soap. As the camera was small it made it easy for use to shoot a range of different camera shots, and was helpful for shooting point of view shots.



Tripod:
We used the tripod in order to make our shots steady, it was also effective when capturing our panning shots within our trailer which are used to follow the navigation of characters.