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