Mood Board

Here is a generic mood board I created from different TV listing magazines. After reading and researching TV listing magazines on a whole I then cut out and stuck together a mood board to give me an idea of what TV covers and magazines are like.

Front cover vs Poster

How similar images should be used especially with a new soap as then the audience will recognise the characters that are about to appear on their tv screens. We have decided to create 3 different posters to coincide with our story lines. We will have a poster of Zak, Brandon and Paige to follow our 'gay' storyline then we will have a poster of just Ben on his own to show our 'drugs' storyline and our final poster will include the whole cast. As there are three members in our group we can all work on a poster each.
Then for our front cover of a TV listing magazine, we are thinking to focus our TV cover on Zak, Brandon and Paige's story line as this is the most visible story through our trailer.

Targeting our audience, Audience research.

We are basing our own soap on e4's Skins which is centered on the themes of "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" from looking on the series one trailer, although we don't want to glamourise any of this too much, we do wish to stick with the same ideas in a thematic way.

The basis for our idea has come from the existing E4 programme (although not a soap) "Skins" it follows the stories of a group of teenagers, as they go through the two years of a sixth form college. Skins is known for including hard hitting story lines within their series, over the last few years, they have dealt with issues such as drug addiction, the death of a parent and disabilities. We have the same view of our own soap, and if we were to develop it further would hope for the same effect, therefore I believe we would have a very similar target audience. In my opinion their target audience would be 16-20 year olds, this is due to it dealing with relevant story lines for this age group, therefore it features characters of similar same ages. Looking at the socioeconomic grouping, they would be in group E, due to being mostly students. However, this doesn't mean that the target audience is limited to this group only.


How can we appeal to our target audience of 16-20 year olds?

Initially we can appeal to the target audience by including story lines that are relevant to them, our story lines are;
Gay/straight love triangle
STD and sexual health
Drug abuse

Our trailer will include scenes of an 'dumbed down' adult nature along with parties and drinking, whilst introducing our three main stories. We are including these scenes in order to entice and attract our audience. We are also including the props of empty alcohol bottles to further show the idea of a group of friends socialising at a party. We are also going to include a lot of fast edits for the Boys Village scenes in order to keep the stories fast paced and interesting. Furthermore we are going to include actors of a similar age, all our actors range from ages 16-18 as to keep it modern, contemporary and appealing.
Lastly, we are going to base Paige's character entirely on Effy from skins, we are doing this as a way of showing the audience something they are already familiar with, in order to entice them to our own soap.


Here is Effy;

Existing Products

Below are some existing tv listing front covers that I have got from the Internet
Most of the covers use bright, neon colours to attract an audience of middle aged women, the key demographic who watch soaps on tv. These tv listings magazines always include the title of the magazine, a price (which is normally well under a pound) a main picture and headline and four or five other pictures and story lines. Most of the pictures on the front of these tv listings are front on pictures of only one or two characters from a soap and they are normally surrounded in a thin, white, fuzzy glow that, to its target audience, makes the person in the picture look almost angelic or desirable.
I have also included a picture of radio times front cover as it is much simpler. It uses more natural colourings and tones and normally focuses in on one picture and some written text, it is much more appealing to look at.
The final image I have included is of a annotated tv listing cover, it highlights all the important elements that make a standard listings cover.

Editing

Due to the schools network being down all week, today was the first day we were able to get our filmed footage on the mac computers and start editing. The footage is looking really good, we're hoping to finish a rough draft of our trailer together by the end of the Christmas term (20th December)

Filming update 3.0

Sunday was our last filming day in our final location. At a last minute we changed the location to our back up at Ogmore Castle, due to timings and some of our actors having commitments in the afternoon. This was not a problem though.
When we got to Ogmore Castle there were quite a few people enjoying days out with their families, we made sure to approach them and explain what we were doing. Everyone was very helpful and stood out of the way of our filming.
Due to the nature of our trailer, we decided we wanted the actors to improvise a lot to get a more naturalistic feel. This worked incredibly well and two of our actors Zak and Paige who have the main storyline of our trailer, were by far the best on the day. Below are some stills from filming:

Back up location

As a back up plan we are going to use Ogmore Castle as our third location as Boy's Village is due to be knocked down and turned into five studio flats. We double checked in the week that what we needed down at Boy's Village was needed and it is all intact, however we felt it best to cover our backs.

PROPS AND COSTUMES

We want to have our actors in casual clothes so that they are comfy and easy to move and film.

Props will involve:

• empty bottles 
• a football
• bags and tablet bottles

SCRIPT

While Stevie is away this week me and Stephen have looked closely at some example scripts to see how to construct our own. However after a lot of research we have decided not to construct a script as our trailer does not use any speech. We have purposely decided to not put any speech in as we feel  the welsh accent would make our film a little tacky. I personally think that no speech would make our trailer more dramatic, just having music played over the top of the footage we film will catch the audiences eye and intrigue our target teen audience in.

FILMING UPDATE 2.0

Here is a quick video taken on my web cam at home, it's an update of how our filming is going this week. 

STORY BOARD

Here is the first draft of our storyboard, we tried to get all our locations and all the information on one storyboard, however when we revisited the storyboard, it was too confusing to follow.

 Here are some pictures of our final draft of our storyboards; we split our trailer into three different storyboards so it was easier when it came filming and seeing our ideas clearer.

 here is a short bit of film footage showing us working as a group to create storyboards one lesson.

This is our second location of Bens house when he is receiving his letter through the post

This is our first location of Zaks bedroom

Here is our third location where a lot of the action takes place - Boys Village 

UPDATE!!

On Wednesday 14th November, we started to film our soap trailer. We have 3 different location shots for 'Boys Village.'
Our three different locations are:

• Zaks Bedroom
• Boys Village in St Athens 
• Ben's House

The filming for Zak's bedroom is now complete. 

Final Cast

We have around 15 people who have volunteered to help with filming when we go to Boys Village. Those people include:

Filmers:



Stevie Anthony
Hannah Parker
Stephen Pearce


Girls:
Zoe Smith
Lauren Barber
Megan Mctravers
Nia Jones
Eve Thomas
Sophie Bees
Paige Rees
Hannah Parker

Boys:
Jevan Cannon
Zak Rossaye
Brandon Frowen
Ben Hunter
Karl Deacy

Trainspotting; Choose Life.

We have been looking at voice overs from different films to inspire a voice over for our own trailer. We were looking at the film 'Trainspotting' and really like the 'choose life' opening. Although we can't use the exact quote we would like to create our own dumbed down version. Below is the clip and quote itself;

'Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing you last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?'

- The direct quote from trainspotting.

Analysis of trailer

For my soap opera research I'm going to analysis an Eastenders trailer from 2009, it is a trailer involving one of Eastenders most famous characters, Peggy Mitchell played by Barber Windsor. I chose this particular trailer to analysis as it is modern but completely separate from the soap, people who don't even watch the soap would be able to enjoy this advert. Without knowing the storyline of this soap we know it involves a wedding day, Peggy Mitchell's, and about how the man she is about to marry has changed her from, loud and fierce to a quiet old woman. In this advert we can see the physical changes that happen to Peggy, this is a metaphor for the mental changes that have happened to this character. Below is the trailer and full analysis:

The trailer starts with a pitch black room, in the middle of the room is a woman it appears, she is wearing white sitting on a cream white chair at at a vanity table of the same colour. A non- diagetic 'plinky' almost wound up music box music is played through out the trailer, - this piece of music is called I'll tell you a story by Colleen, I think the name of the song fits well with the trailer, it is not a stereotypical trailer that uses a lot of scenes that have already been filmed, this trailer is surreal and completely separate from the soap itself - The next scene is a medium close up of the vanity table, there are pink flowers on the table and our eye is drawn to the glass perfume bottle centre of screen, the bottle is picked up and the next shot is of Peggy Mitchell dabbing on perfume, she is in white and face and make up is done. It is clear that it is her wedding day she is preparing for, she smiles as she puts the perfume on. Next shot is an over the shoulder shot of Peggy looking into the vanity table mirror, a silhouette of a man in a wedding suit is seen in the mirror, at the opposite end of the room, he is illuminated by a single white square. Peggy looks up at him and her face changes, she is immediately saddened.

The man in the background of the shot is not clear to see, how
ever watchers of the soap who have followed the story line know
that the man is Archie.

The next shot is a medium shot of the man, the audience can confirm their ideas that it is Archie, Peggy's fiance. He is the juxtaposes with the shot of Peggy who is in white surrounded by the black, the only light of Archie's shot is his face and white shirt. The white of Peggy shows her innocence and vulnerability, whereas the black that surrounds Archie suggests dark, dangerous and makes the audience not want to trust him. After this we have a long shot, Archie is in silhouette again and before him white squares light up. Peggy, in wedding dress walks from the vanity table across the white titles towards Archie.
As Peggy watches towards Archie, almost 'robotic arms' come towards Peggy, the first arm on the left of he removes a big white corsage. As the arm removes things from Peggy's outfit there is the diagetic sound of the arm moving, it contrasts with the picture as the scene using two members of the older generation at a traditional vanity table in traditional wedding wear. The robotic arm is cold, modern and alien. There are shot reverse shots between Archie and Peggy being stripped of her personal touches on her wedding dress, we can see the shot in her face and a growing anger as the train of her dress is taken away, she has her tiara swapped for a much more dumbed down, older version and a frilly piece of material is placed over her chest, Peggy looks down confused, shot reverse shot of Archie smiling at this. There is a medium close up of Peggy's face, a laser goes across her face followed by another long robotic arm that sprays some sort of liquid across her face. As the mist clears a plastic face that can't move is revealed. It is shiny and 'perfect' looking. An over the shoulder shot from behind Peggy shows Archie looking very smug, the next shot we see him placing a pearl necklace around Peggy's throat, he looks menacing as if he might strangle Peggy. Through out the advert the audience can feel the tension rise as Peggy is changed, we grow to hate Archie by the end of the advert for what he has done to Peggy.
A woman voice over says "He's got Peggy under control, but for how much longer?" As this is said there is a close up of Peggy's left eye, the pupil dilates and the BBC red background swirls itself around  the black pupil until all the screen says is 'Thursday 2nd April. Eastenders: The Wedding.' The final non-diagetic piece we hear is the famous drums of the Eastenders theme tune. This trailer is only 0.41 seconds long, however it tells a lot in such a short time, if we can create a grabbing trailer like this, our teen audience that we have chosen to aim, are bound to love it.

Auditions

To get the best actors and actresses for our soap opera trailer, we thought it would be best to hold auditions. We are going to mock up a script for people to read and see who is best to star in our trailer.


MOCK SCRIPT:

Alo: We are the children of the revolution!

Anwar: I'm praying to my God here, Cass.

Cassie: Oh... wow... is he listening?

Anwar: I hope not, otherwise he'll know about all those pills I necked last night.

Cassie: Think quietly.

Red: [narrating] I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Our mock script includes a line from our actual trailer, a conversation from a skins episode to see how well they act and react and a monologue from the film Shawshank Redemption. If we are happy with the way they have preformed we'll ask them then to be in the filming process, also if we particularly like anyone, we might get them to read our voice over if we chooose to have on over the top of our trailer.

Here are some of the auditions we filmed:

 

The Valleys

Due to the new release of the MTV's welsh 'The Valleys' we looked at the trailer for the new series as it follows a party scenario and is filmed so close to home. Although it is degrading it is a very well put together sequence.

Final Idea with Scenes.



Here are the stills of the 1st scene we want to recreate.

1. Crabbing shot of Zak and Paige (in bed, must see photo of Zak and Brandon) phone ringing, lots of missed calls from Brandon. Zak closes eyes - fade to party.

This scene is inspired by a particular scene from Skins series 4, where there is a crabbing  shot of a bedroom across to the bed where the characer Freddie is sleeping, he opens his eyes and there is a cut to the next scene. I have posted this scene in other posts, it runs from 0.16 - 0.24 in the video, and here are some stills of the scene we want to recreate.

This is the 'we are the children of the revolution' scene we which
to make our own.

2. Establishing shot, of keep out sign camera follows someone running to party - pool with people - Karl at the top of the pool 'We are the children of the revolution'

3. Low angle shot - general party

4. Pan - general party

5. High angle shot - Brandon and Zak - close up establish relationship

for shot 8, running scene inspired by this shot.

6. General party scene

7. General party scene (climbing out of pool.)

8. Running to church - lead by Karl.

9. Cut to inside church - (drugs in a separate room)

10. Ben walks off with Hannah.

11. New scene in bed, Ben wakes up, phone call 'it's positive' he says 'f***' he hangs up - he closes his eyes.

12. Hannah and Ben alone, 'suggestive intimacy' closes eyes.

13. Ben in room, phones Hannah -goes to voicemail.

Shot 15, we like the idea of a window shot, as it creates
alot of new ideas, layers and meaings for the soap.

14. Slo-mo of Karl and drugs.

15. Our effy character Paige at the window, smoking. Zak leaves room looking distressed.

16. Kiss between two characters.

17. Brandon texts Zak.

19. Hannah smokes pipe.

20. Paige walks towards Zak

21. Title.

E4 Company

The company we are going to show our soap opera on is E4.

E4 is a British television channel, it is a companion to Channel 4 and has been live since 18th January 2001. The 'E' stands for entertainment and the channel is mainly aimed at the 15-35 age group. They include both British and U.S programming such as The Ricky Gervais Show, Glee, Scrubs and formerly Friends. British shows include Shameless, Hollyoaks, Skins, The Inbetweeners and Misfit.

The age range is perfect for what we want to aim at, plus we are mimicking a 'Skins' like soap and E4 are a company that are willing to show some more 'cutting edge' storylines that we want to portray.

Soap Opera Titles

A lot of soap operas use place names as their titles, such as East Enders and Coronation  Street.
We thought about this a lot when trying to come up with a name for our soap, we looked at different titles and fonts to help decide a name.
Titles normally include a easily readable font and a background of where it is set.

However as our soap is aimed at teenagers we need a more appealing 'logo' we are going to stay away from the conventional title on background of where it is set, and perhaps stick with a simple logo. 

The title of our soap is going to be 'Boys Village' which is where we are actually filming our soap, we also like the sound of the name and the word 'boy' suggests a younger audience already without even showing the trailer.  

Below are a few ideas of fonts for our title:

When looking at a tag line our current idea is Boys Village, 'where the girls come to play'

Music ideas

For our soap opera we would like to use music by a welsh band called 'Kids in Glass Houses.' Stevie went on twitter and asked for their permission to use their music, this way we don't breach any copyright restrictions.

Here is the tweet and it's reply, from the bass guitar player saying it was fine for us to use their music. 

Below are some youtube videos that include the songs by K.I.G.H's music. 

This song is 'Teenage Wonderland' by Kids in Glass Houses, we like the upbeat rocky song and also the songs title would fit perfectly with out theme and teenage soap.

This song is called Not in this World, it again has a rocky upbeat. 

And this is song is called Diamond Days, another great song that we might like to use. 

Trip to Boys Village

We took a trip to Boys Village in St. Athens to see if it would be acceptable to use as a film location.
St Athan Boys' Village was a village-style holiday camp located in West Aberthaw, Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. It is now all derelict and abandoned, bands like Deaf Havana and Funeral for a Friend have filmed music videos there which I have embedded.
While at Boys Village I took a lot of photos below I have uploaded them.

Here is the old swimming pool which is where we would like to base our party

We like this shot, it is in one of the old dormitory's, we'd like to shoot some footage here.

Here is a map image of where boy's village is in south wales.

The old church

We liked this room, the title floor gives it a retro feel that we could also film the party in.

Here are two music videos that have both been filmed at 'Boys Village' 

This is a music video for the song 'I'm a bore, mostly' by the band Deaf Havana who filmed at Boy's Village. 

And this is the Funeral for a Friend music video for serpents in solitude.