Presentationi

1. In what ways does your media product use, develop, or challenge forms and conventions of real

media products?

For our media production we decided to create a new soap opera. As a group we had to do thorough research into the genre of soap operas and compare the similarities and differences between different soaps. We also looked into the forms and conventions in soap operas.

The main soap operas we looked at were Eastenders, Corronation street and Hollyoaks.

We each did a textual analysis on a soap to help us further understand the conventions seen within soaps. From our research we decided to create a soap which was both social realist and light entertainment, this is similar to Hollyoaks. We wanted a soap which would appeal to our target audience by being interesting and dramatic but in a light hearted way.

For example at the party scene we see a close up shot of Luke, played by David Garcia, smiling, then it flashes back to him being vioelent towards his girllfriend. Abuse is soemthing that teenagers can go through but it is not widely talked about. We wanted to show any teeangers that are affected by issues like abuse , that it can be dealth with and that there are other people in similar positions.

Some of the other characters we see in our trailer is someone doing cocaine, drugs are often used among teenagers so teenagers could relate.

As our target audience is 16-34 year olds we thought the setting of it in a university would be effective as our audience will either be looking to go to university, be at university or recently left, this will help attract our audience by it being in a setting that the majority will be able to relate to easily.

We will have more than one trailer and each trailer will show different characters and their storylines. This way we can also target the different trailers at different audiences e.g. male and females, teenagers and young adults.

For our stock characters we used the typical conventional characters that you would find in any soap, but to make sure our audience didn’t think that we had just copied characters from other soaps we challanged them too. The charcters which had the main storylines at the moment were highlighted in our trailer by focusing on their faces and someitims with a flash back to what there life is like.