Poster Final Draft and Development

This is our final poster. We hope to achieve three targets with this product…

·         Advertise our soap opera.

·         Encode a message which was successfully decoded by the audience.

·         Looks aesthetically pleasing, meeting levels of industry standard.

Advertising our soap opera.

To advertise our soap opera successfully we followed conventions of advertisement posters which have been used in the past to successfully advertise products. We included days, timings, channel and the soaps name. By including the following we give our potential audience full opportunities to watch our soap opera.

Encode a message which was successfully decoded by the audience.

We had to connote messages to the audience about characters, locations and storylines. These messages then can be decoded by the audience and hopefully have a preferred reading from the audience who understands the messages presented. Stuart Hall, media theorist, says there are three ways the audience will decode a message…

·         A preferred reading as the producer intended.

·         A negotiated reading, so some parts of the producer’s intention were accepted.

·         A resistant reading, where the audience disagrees with the producer’s intention and find meaning or a different kind behind the decoding.  

How did we encode messages to the audience regarding characters and plots? And how did they decode these messages? We needed the audience to acknowledge the main plot of the soap opera launch was the arrival of Rachel. Equilibrium was in motion within Mill Lane until this character disturbed the piece (the beginning of Todorov’s theory). We encoded this character and her plot through colours, framing and wording. By having only Rachel in colour within the centre of the poster the audience can determine that Rachel is the character which the title is referring to. The title explains the plot and gives the audience a rough understanding of Rachel history, thus, establishing her and her plot. This was recognised by the audience and was a reading preferred by our production team. Other characters stand beside their piers within storylines which could be decoded by the audience, but equally, may be a negotiated reading of the media text. Outfits may suggest links to the characters but by advertising the main story within the poster the potential market can establish a rough idea of the plot behind Mill Lane.

How did we encode messages of the location to the audience and how did they decode these messages? By having the characters beside Rachel in the back in a brown (associated with old) colour scheme you can determine these people live a stereotypical old style life. The slogan informs the audience that Rachel is bringing Essex to Mill Lane. So we know these residences are from Mill Lane. The colour scheme of the residence therefore connotes Mill Lane is an old fashioned, stereotypical rural village that live of the land through farming (connoted by Charlie Collins farming outfit to the far right of the frame) and other outdoor vacancies. This message was decoded successfully by the market and therefore was a preferred reading.