Group Planning: Pitch

Left: Seb Hall, Centre Left: David Maddy, Centre Right: Myself - Dalian White, Right: Philip Gatward

In order to obtain feedback on our goups ideas for a new soap and trailer, we had to plan and deliver a pitch to the class.

Our roles which we assigned within our group for the pitch were and a description of each section:

Seb: Name and Channel, Roles.

As we was undecided on a name for our soap we did not have a title for our soap in time for the pitch.

The chanel we chose to air our soap on was BBC 1; the main aim for this was to be the channels equivalent to Channel 4's Hollyoaks, we felt this would be new for the channel and attract younger audiences to watch.

David: Location Photos, Music.

For our group planning we needed location photos in order to find locations where we would be able to film our footage. After taking photos for our planning we used them in our pitch, the key locations within our pitch was the Pig and Falcon (Pub/Communal Area), and an Alley (for drug scene). We was also still undecided on the music for our soap as we was still planning our storyboards for the soap, a website which we had been using to look for music was Sound Cloud.

Myself: Target Audience, Editing Specification.

As we wanted to be the equivalent to channels 4's Hollyoaks on BBC 1 because we wanted to attract a younger audience, we decided to target the age group of 16-24. We had a very brief outline of the editing that we wanted to use within our soap which was based on the story board. As many soaps are used to create realism we did not want to include a lot of editing within our trailer, so we aimed to use as much raw footage as possible, as a group we decided we would use basic dissolves, and title screens within our trailer.

Philip: Characters

Finally we mentioned the characters within our soap trailer that we wanted to introduce, these where mainly teenaged males, we planned to use two males for the drug deal, a male losing a bet, and a pair of males getting ready to go out, and a coouple (one male/one female) which would be used to exploit the theme of family issues as we wanted an argument to occur within the trialer.

Pitch Feedback

The key feedback we recieved in order to help us with the planning of our soap, was to come up with a title by using local location or something which can relate to the characters of the soap we have created. The class suggested that we also involve more female roles within the soap as they are matriarchs within soaps so it was important to have females within a soap. The final piece of feedback which we recieved from our pitch was based on the music and to have a more specific target audience and valid reason as to why we have chosen to target them.

Settings: British Soap Operas

 Many British soap operas use common/public areas for their settings. Most sets used for soaps contain houses where the local characters reside and a communal area such as a pub. The use of these communal areas helps to create a multi-strand narrative as well as interlink characters and storyline of a single episode.  We see many times where a vast amount of characters within one episode, are all in one communal area.  A good example of this would be Eastenders where characters meet at the Queen Vic.

Another key reason for having these types of settings is in order to create a sense of realism. This is because they are places which we; the viewers can relate to, and is where we also go for family or friend gatherings.  Examples from British soaps of these types of settings include; Eastenders (Queen Victoria), Hollyoaks (Dog in the Pond), and Coronation Street (The Rovers Return). Below are images of these settings.

 Eastenders: The Queen Victoria

 Hollyoaks: The Dog in the Pond

 Coronation Street: The Rovers Return

Other settings within soaps usually include profession; an example may be a corner shop, salon, restaurant or a club. These also add to the realism of soaps, as they gives us more information on the characters and what they do for a living, which makes their personality and lifestyles more believable.