Friday, 7 October 2011

Draft Script 2

This is our second draft of the script, we have made one large change, we have decided that the use of an interviewer would slow down the piece. To combat this we have rearranged the script, we have now taken out the interviewers questions but left in the answers. These answers make sense on their own so the audience can easily follow the trailer.

First Interview:


Interviewee: Well a usual day for me consists of studying and reading.


Second interview:

Interviewee: I think i would bring a bit of excitement and added intellect to the course.

Scene Outside:

First interviewee: Alright mate how was yours?

Second interviewee: Yeah, lied my way through that i think

First interviewee: Same, wheres lee?

Second interviewee: I will call him.

Will Howlett

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

Draft script

Our initial ideas for our film involves minimal talking, this is due to different factors which we decided would make our film look less professional. With the use of minimal conversation the focus is on the action and the feeling of the soap. A large reason for our decision is the lack of actors which would be able to handle a role with lots of dialogue.

Our piece involves a scene with an interview.

First Interview:


Interviewer: What do you like to do in your spare time?

Interviewee: Well a usual day for me consists of studying and reading.


Second interview:

Interviewer: What do you think you would bring to this course?

Interviewee: I think i would bring a bit of excitement and added intellect to the course.

Scene Outside:

First interviewee: alright mate how was yours?

Second interviewee: Yeah, lied my way through that i think

First interviewee: Same, wheres lee?

Second interviewee: I will call him.

Will Howlett

Tuesday, 27 September 2011

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.

Monday, 26 September 2011

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

Wednesday, 21 September 2011

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

Friday, 9 September 2011

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.