It is not surprising that Hollyoaks unlike the majority of other soaps uses posters, as it is an unconventional soap; different to other soaps. When analysing the poster i realised that Hollyoaks used the fact that it was different as a highlight for their poster and were proud of that.....*The poster is mocking other soaps such as Eastenders and
Coronation Street for their emphasis on pubs and perhaps for having a pub as the dominant central meeting point in their soap, through it featuring pubs and drunken people negatively. Hollyoaks is shown in the poster, as not being about drunken people in pubs like other conventional soaps but about young, glamorous, sophisticated characters. And so the image presented is a real one as shown through their annual calendar which features airbrushed, athletic, sexy, well presented characters and the soaps emphasis on student life.*Throughout the whole poster there is a theme of spot the difference almost. This is clever not only because it takes the same format at spot the difference games in magazines, which the young target audience of Hollyoaks will be regularly read and so they will be attracted by this, but also because straight away it represents other soaps negatively whilst appearing positive and ‘better than the rest’.
*The second image is intended to be everything that Hollyoaks represents, such as glamour, brightness and clever ideas as well as being different. Therefore, straight away when audiences look at the poster they will straight away draw a comparison which will put the second image as a better option. As a result the individual will begin to watch Hollyoaks rather than other soaps because the poster shows them to be not good enough and far less appealing.
*It can also be argued that Hollyoaks uses class to appeal to audiences and uses this as one of its criticisms of conventional soaps like Eastenders and Coronation Street. This is because the poster representing Hollyoaks is far better mannered and neatly represented. This is shown through the couple fighting who are shown in the second poster as Latin dancing, and the dog that is urinating on the carpet is shown neatly brushed in pink, eating from its plate.
Posted by Aya
After analysing this i think it’s very important we represent our poster to our target audience in a form relating to them as Hollyoaks has done here. Also symbolism is very important. The Hollyoaks poster contains few words yet it conveys many powerful messages. An idea for our soap poster is to use the same spot the difference strategy one with an image of hopeless jobless people sitting in a tacky pub whilst the other can be of a meeting room in the office and all the characters working hard. This should then be accompanied with a slogan making the person feel that watching the soap is like helping to tackle the recession....something like ‘together let’s fight this’ . However, due to the fact that our target audience is not purely older teens we would need to make it slightly more mature through the font, language and even the style of the image outline. We could also include small print...WHAT DO YOU THINK?
I do really like this idea, visually it's very striking and contains many elements of personal interpretation and humour. The problem i can see with executing something of this style is that we won't have the resources or skills to do so. By this i mean; we're not skilled to use photoshop in this sense, i doubt we'll have access to a diverse character range of this calibre, nor do i think we'll have the adequate props to portray the strong inconography we desire.
ReplyDeleteI would personally suggest we keep in simple in the context of the other Hollyoaks poster we all first looked at. I'm open to hear any suggestions of how we can produce such a poster so long it's a realistic plan.