Group Planning: Ideas for a New Soap (Barristers)

As we have been assigned a group task to create a trailer for a new soap, we had to think of a new idea for a soap.

My group was struggling to come up with an idea amongst themselves whilst I not in the classroom momentarily, when I returned they had a couple of ideas of sterotypical teen ages problems, some of the ideas that they had discussed was a teenager getting chased by the police; I challenged this as I felt that it would be too sterotypical, and give teenagers a negative image.

Initially I wanted to do something completely different as a soap, not only to grab the interrest of many people, but to also challenge media conventions as there are not many soaps apart from Hollyoaks which do so. The idea which I had came up with was 'Barristers', this was because I felt it would be new and fresh to televison as a soap.

By using profession of a Barrister as a main theme for a soap opera, it enabled a real life mirror of those an up close view on higher class citizens rather than the typical working classes which are resembled in many soaps today, however we would have still been able to include lower and working classes within the soap by adding court cases, not only would this show poeples issues that viewers would be able to relate to, it would also create more storylines which would be able to be interwoven.

The main location idea I had for the soap was a court room, as this is where the hearing would be held, and law firm offices. However as it is a soap we did not want to fully challenge soap conventions so we looked to include communial areas as well, and homes so characters could gossip and representations of their personal life would also be shown.

We also had a few ideas of what storylines we could include which people would be able to gossip about, I have listed some of the initial ideas which we had that lesson below:

• Affair between barristers.
• Barrister losing their job, through curruption.
• Someone being sentenced, attacking a barrister in communeral area.

Some of the problems which we faced on the soap was where we would actually film the shots of a court room, as we felt that we did not have the correct props and mise-en-scene which would have to be included, as well as enough charaters we could use to create a realistic court hearing.
Taking these problems into consideration we chose not to stick with the plan, so we decided to change the idea.