Target Audience Initial ideas - Mind Map

As a group we have created a mind map of the initial ideas of for our soap, we did this so we could find what audience we are targetting andhow we would entice different groups of people to watching our soap opera.

Through this excercise we have realised that our soap will be targetting a wide variety of people from different age groups and demographic groups.

Soap Opera Initial ideas - Write Up

After creating a mood board and mind map and discussing as a group our initial ideas for our soap opera we have come to a decision of what we want our soap opera to consist of.

Location - The location we have chosen for our soap opera will be a stereotypical town consisting of such places as nightclubs, pubs, cafes for our characters to go to. We have taken inspiration for this from the SU bar in Hollyoaks, these sorts of bars are common on university campuses so to keep in with verisimilitude we would include these in our locations.

Characters - The age of our characters we have chosen will be between 16 and 19. Our characters will be college age. There will be a mixture of types of characters in our soap opera consisting of stereotypical emo's chavs and indie kids, like those off dramas such as Skins, Misfits and Hollyoaks.

Storylines - The storylines of our soap will be a rebellious over the top look at student life consisting of use of alcohol drugs and drink. The teens will get in trouble with the law and generally be rebellious in the story lines.



Narrative - Our narrative would show the contradicting views on life at a university and the different emotions felt by students. As our piece is a soap opera it will be an open narrative.


Real media products/inspirations - We will be using a popular E4 programme 'Skins' as our inspirational product as this is what our soap opera will mostly relate too because of the rebellion theme and use of young adults/teens. Our soap will also relate to 'Hollyoaks' as this programme also uses mostly young characters so our soap opera will be a mixture of the characters from 'Skins' and the story lines from 'Hollyoaks'. Another relation to our media product will be 'Eastenders' as the setting will be similar (Town/City mainly outside) 'Eastenders' is the type of location we will be looking for when filming our media product.

Target Audience - There is a wide target audience for our Soap opera due to the use of many different types of character in the shows however there is a clear age range we are aiming for which will be teenagers due to the use of teenagers as our characters as we feel that teenagers will be able to relate to what they are seeing. We will be aiming at low demographic groups as our target audience due to the use of setting for our soap, as it will be filmed in city areas low demographic groups may be able to relate to what they see and to the story lines that occur.

Titles - Our titles will need to reflect on students and teenage life's, the titles need to be fast paced to keep up with what will happen in each episode as the soap will be as a whole fast paced.

Our piece will follow the same conventions as other soaps and dramas such as Skins, Hollyoaks, Beaver Falls and Inbetweeners. As a group we enjoy these dramas and feel that a mixture of the styles of these could make great watching. The trailers for a selection of these dramas shows our point as they use comedy to show serious points.

Trailer for Misfits:


Trailer for Inbetweeners series 3:




Trailer for Skins series1:

 

Trailer for Beaver Falls:

 

I have found these trailers to highlight the things that we want to include in our trailer, these trailers use comedy and excitement to get people to want to watch the soap. This is how we want to attract people to our soap.

Will Howlett

Health and Safety

When filming our piece we must make sure we are safe, this will be done so no harm will come to us whilst making the film.

We will follow a set of rules set out to us by our teachers.

Health and safety we need to follow when filming:

Remember that we are concentrating on filming be aware of traffic

Always be polite and respectful when interacting with the public

Do not attempt to film anything that could be constructed by a passer as illegal

If you are going to try and film in a public place you should approach the people who are in charge of that place for permission

Do not film in dangerous places

Soap Opera Brief

As a group we are going to produce a trailer for our soap alongside a poster and magazine cover. These would are all created to heighten the demand for this soap and to increase audience figures which would help our production team to increase in size and influence. All of these would link together through the same characters being used which would make them become more famous which would create more of a call for those characters to be seen in different situations. 




Friends is a good example of a drama involving a tight group
of friends trying to achieve the same things.



When we were mind mapping ideas for our soap we looked at different soap operas and TV series used the same conventions as what we were aiming to include in our soap. Shows such as Skins, Misfits, Friends, Beaver falls, Inbetweeners and Hollyoaks. We took influences from each of these by looking at story lines, characters, settings and plots. The shows we took influence from are not predominately soap operas but do contain elements which we would like to include in our piece.

When we researched into different soap operas we realised that comedy was very rarely included in them, we want to create a soap opera which has comedy but with serious story lines, such as in Friends and Skins. As we are going to base the Soap around groups of teenagers growing up and the continual changing of cast members is in line with the way that Skins and Hollyoaks create their shows.


In our trailer we would give hints and clues to what the story lines will be about, we would like to incorporate the use of technology into our piece to give different views on whether the large scale use of social networking and mobile phones has a good effect on teenage life or a bad one. In the first episode we would make sure every character has been introduced, then a problem would occur to create a storyline that we could expand on in later episodes. The ideal layout of our soap would not be have a single storyline which every character is involved with but smaller story lines which makes all the characters become involved in. This would be creating verisimilitude in our work as this is the way that life of our characters age would play out.

The four main characters in Inbetweeners are
very close, the females are used to separate them.
We have got inspiration from this.

As we are creating a brand new soap opera we would not be sure how the audience would take to it, we would like to create a feeling of sympathy for teenagers who get caught up in situations which can be construed as negative social behaviour. We would like to create questions for the audience and teach them about the structure of a typical group of people who are coming of age. We would like to have the audience to be asking whether or not teenage life is really how it is portrayed. This would increase the number of viewers as not only teenagers (who could relate to the show)

but people from other age groups could

use the show for entrainment purposes but

also for educational reasons.

Will Howlett

Mind Map of Target Audience

As a group we have created a mind map showing our ideas of what kind of people would be our target audience and how we would entice other groups of people to watch our soap.

Whilst we created this mind map we realised that our soap would encorperate many soap opera conventions using the settings and locations which would bring in more viewers. Also the demographic group we are aiming at E/D has the most amount of people in it so we are aiming at the largest number of people possible.

Conventions Found in Trailers Compared to Full Episodes

Conventions found in soap opera trailers:

• Large amount of jump shots
• Short length
• Smaller amount of characters shown
• Only large action is shown
• Music behind the trailers
• Singular narrative

Example of a Soap Trailer:

I have found this clip as it follows most of the conventions found in trailers. It is a good example of the type of trailer that we should make as it is clearly a trailer and is not in any way like an episode.

Conventions found in soap opera episodes:

• Full length
• Larger amount of characters shown
• Less of a soundtrack
• Smaller storylines are shown
• Storylines broadened
• Slower editing
• Different narratives

Example of a Soap episode:




This is an episode from Eastenders. I have chosen this episode as it also uses the conventions that i have found out. This is not a special episode so it shows how episodes run most days.


I have found examples of a soap episode and a soap trailer from the same soap opera. I have done this so the difference between them is obvious as the style is the same as it is from the same makers.

Listing the differences enables our group to see what is included in trailers and how they differ from episodes. A common mistake is the mixture of both styles, this takes away the edge from the trailer.

Soap Opera initial ideas Brief

As a group we needed to consider initial ideas for the first few episodes of our soap so that we have a wider understanding of what we will be doing.

We needed to consider initial ideas for the following;

Location - We needed to consider where our soap will be set eg country/city

Characters - We needed to consider characters names/ages/status/relationship ect

Storylines within your soap opera - We needed to consider what will happen in our soap

Types of narrative - We needed to consider the types of narrative we will use in our soap

Real media products/soap inspirations - We needed to consider inspirations from other soaps eg storylines

Brief ideas on target audience - We needed to consider what sort of person our soap will be aimed at

A title for our soap - We need to think of a name for our soap that is appropriate and catchy

Soap opera target audience results analysis

After creating a questionnaire and presenting it to 10 people to complete I obtained a range of results for the questions I asked. I then took these results and analysed them so that I could get a clear understanding of how the audience feel and what they expect from watching a soap opera this will help me when creating our own soap opera as to what the audience will expect to see so that we create a successful soap opera.

From Question 1 - What do you expect in general from this genre?

It was clear that the audience expect to see real life situations and real life people in the show they want to relate to what is happening and they want the programme to be realistic, this shows us that when we create our soap opera we need to follow this we need to create verisimilitude towards our target audience to ensure they can relate to what is happening in the show.

From Question 2 - What settings would you expect to see?
 once again the answers we obtained were similar all the answers we got were stereotypical places in a town or city consisting of such places as pubs and cafes. From these results we now know what the target audience expect to see setting wise in our soap opera the setting will need to be a city or town that consists of stereotypical places such as pubs, clubs, cafes, shops etc this also is to create verisimilitude towards the audience and links in with the audience relating to what they see.

From Question 3 - Which story line would you expect from a soap opera?

The results were once again similar they consisted of murder, death, marriage and affairs this shows us that the story lines of a soap have to be quite hard hitting they need to be big story lines to entice the viewer and once again these story lines are real life situations the audience may not be able to personally relate to these certain situations but verisimilitude will still be created as these storyline happen in every day life.

From Question 4 - What kind of lighting would you expect to see in a soap opera?

The main answer we got was natural, the audience expect to see mainly natural lighting while watching a soap opera however they also said that it depends on the storyline if it is a dark storyline like murder for example then the lighting they would expect to see would be dark but if for example it was a wedding then the lighting would be light so it depends on whether it is a happy or sad storyline as to what lighting will be used the lighting will depend on the emotion we are trying to get our audience to feel.

From Question 5 - What pitch music do you expect to hear?

The answers were similar to the lighting it depends on the storyline as to what music is played if the storyline is upsetting then the music should be low pitch and slow tempo but if the storyline is happy then the music should be high pitch and fast tempo. The music the audience said they expect to hear is the theme tune for the soap every soap needs to have a theme tune.

From Question 6 - What emotions do you expect to feel during a soap opera?

The answers all said the same they all answered that they expect to feel a range of emotions depending on the storyline that is going on so when we create our soap opera we need to make sure that we create the correct atmosphere for the storyline (so this will include the lighting and music) to ensure that the audience is feeling the correct emotion we want them too.

From Question 7 - What is your favourite soap?

We only obtained 4 different answers, Eastenders, Coronation street, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks. The most popular answer was Eastenders so I will conduct more research into this certain soap and try to follow similar story lines to this soap as they are obviously good as this was the most popular soap chosen.

From Question 8 - How old are you?

I did this so that I could have an unbiased and wider understanding of what different audiences expect from soap operas and whether the answers to the questions change depending on the age of the audience but they appeared to stay the same so all ages who watch soap operas expect to see the same.

From Question 9 - Are you male or female?

I asked this question for the same reason as question 8 so that I obtain a wider understanding of what both genders expect from soap operas and whether the answers to the questions change depending on the gender but they appeared to stay the same this shows me that when aiming for a certain target audience gender shouldn't be a difference.

We created this questionnaire so as a group we could get a better understanding of what audiences enjoy and expect to see in their soaps.

Will Howlett & Alex Cockburn

Soap Opera Target Audiences

We needed as a group to discover who soap operas are aimed at we needed to consider such things as age and demographic groups, we really needed to find out a lot of information about soaps and what people expect from them so we created a questionnaire consisting of 10 questions that we asked a wide variety of age groups so that our results were not biased and we had a wide understanding of what people should expect from the soap opera genre.


Here is the Questionnaire which we handed out to people:


Audience Questionnaire




We asked these questions to ten people making sure we asked a wide variety of different aged people so we could get a wider understanding.


The results we obtained were:


What do you expect in general from this genre?


Reflection of everyday life- 6
Variation of story lines- 3
Touching on global or national problems-1

What settings would you expect to see from this genre?


Pub- 8
Houses-2
Cafe-5
Taxi service-1
Hairdressers-3
School-6
Park-5

Which storyline would you expect from a soap opera?


Affair-2
Marriage-2
Murder-4
Marriage-1
Death-1


What kind of lighting would you expect to see in a soap opera?


Natural-7
Dependent on setting-2
Artificial-1




What pitch music do you expect to hear in a soap opera?


Happy-3
Sad-2
Varies on storyline-5


What emotions do you expect to feel during a soap opera?

Depends on Story-7
Happy-1
Depression-0
Sorrow-2




What is your favourite soap?


Hollyoaks-1
Eastenders-5
Emmerdale-2
Coronation street-2


How old are you?


15-21  -4
21-30  -3
31-40  -1
41-50  -1
50+      -1


Are you Male or Female?

Male-5
Female-5




We took these results that we obtained from our questionnaire and analysed them so that we could use the information gained to know more about soap operas and what the audience expect from them.




Will Howlett & Alex Cockburn

Key Soap Opera Facts

There is many comparisions between soaps, many follow the same conventions. Many soaps include the same themes, characters and settings. As a group we have discussed our findings and found a number of similiartites.

The places in soaps are very similar, every soap has a pub which the action centres around, the most famous of these is the 'Queen Vic'. Other similarities include Cafes and corner shops. The general layout of settings are similar also. In most soaps the drama is centered around a single street or square.

The same types of characters are portrayed in soaps, they include the same stereotypes. The main groups of characters are:

• The hard man
• Family from different ethnic backgrounds.
• Homosexual
• Teenagers
• Stereotypical female

All soaps cover different demographic groups, they range from class A to class D, they have a large mixture of workers from mechanics to business men. This is done to inter grate a larger audience so people  can identify with characters and what is happening in their own life.

The times that the soaps are on is also similar, they are usually placed before the watershed, this way the audience figures are increased.

All of the similarities between soaps is used to create verisimilitude and to increase audience figures, we will incorporate these conventions into our piece to make the soap successful.

Will Howlett