Meeting 6th January

In this production meeting I discussed a variety of things, but were first for the majority of the lesson split into two groups. One group was to script write and begin to write an idea down, and my group which was to begin marketing and advertising techniques, discuss what would be good etc and refer back to the whole group.

Therefore our group, consisting of Me, Alie, Tim, Ash, Matt and Dave began to work on the marketing and advertising side of things. I first thought about web 2.0 and how this would be a great way to advertise and promote our webseries doe to the technology now available. As a group, we thought we would promote the series by using the following websites:

Facebook (profile for each individual character)

Myspace (same concept)

Twitter

Personal Blogs

Youtube

An individual webseries website - perhaps using Dreamweaver

Vimeo

4Chan (online forum)

Facepunch (online forum)

After this, we set about thinking how we would advertise the webseries other than using the internet, and came up with a variety of ideas such as:

T shirts (for later on in the series) or perhaps print to order

Leaflets

Posters

Magazines

Posters

Stickers

This was a wide variety of advertising and therefore would hopefully get the publics attention. I also thought about newspaper and radio advertising, but think this would harshly exceed our £100 budget, so I thought of the cheapest and most effective alternatives. Therefore, our budget would mainly go on T shirts (print to order), stickers, poster prints, leaflet prints, and perhaps website fees.

After this we had a meeting and discussed our ideas with the group, who seemed pleased with them and agreed with our advertising techniques. I then set on creating a name for the series with the group, and came up with two final alternatives, The Regulars and Detention Deficit, (later changed to The Detention Deficit). In my opinion I preffered Detention Deficit as it related a lot more to the programme in hand, and The Regulars sounded a little vague. After a vote at the end of the lesson the final name for the webseries will be 'The Detention Deficit'.

We were then asked to go back into our groups and to continue working. As a group we then thought about our Target Audience, and decided the best age group to aim for would be 15 - 19 year olds, and after a discussion the whole class agreed this would be the best age group to target.

After this I completed some background research on programmes which included this age group, and looked at the websites for marketing and advertising techniques. The main programmes and websites I looked at were:

Skins

Misfits

We Need Girlfriends (web series)

Chad Vader (web series)

The Guild (web series)

Pwnage (web series)

Dubplate Dramas

After looking at the main content of the website, the look of the website and the ways in which viewers could interact with the programme itself, I thought about the additional content used in the websites. I researched Skins, which had character's costumes for upcoming series, interviews with characters, pictures, style of characters, music used in the programme, cast and crew and an online Blog. There was also a comment box for people to leave comments about the programme, which i think may be a good idea for our web series, if not then a blog would equally be a good idea.

After getting back into a class, we listened to the first initial ideas of the scriptwriting team. In my opinion, the ideas for the first episode were far too complicated, such as fight scenes, an escape scene and establishing scenes of all the characters. These had too much of an extent to fit into the first couple of minutes episode, if they stretched these ideas out to more episodes this may have been a better idea. The group also had various ideas, whereas I thought they should have just had one simple idea and go with that. They also thought they didn't need a title sequence, but a title sequence is essential in the first episode in order to establish the characters immediately.

After this I went back into the group and thought about advertising and marketing using web 2.0 again. What I thought was that each character needs a myspace account, a facebook account and a personal blog, so we will get started on this as soon as possible. The facebook account needed to have brief information about the character, pictures, status updates, links to the web series and website links for further publicity and advertising purposes. However we have not yet cast any actors so this will be quite difficult for pictures etc until the actors are cast, but we will create a rough account and add additional information later on.