We created a rough storyboard for our new idea and planned out some ideas for how the characters would arrive, expressing their personalities to the audience.

Ideas for locations

This field could be used as an area for the community where young children can play or where the community can come together for events and socialise.

We thought that these roads could be good possible location settings as they are dead ends, meaning that we would be easily able to film without causing any disturbances or putting anyone in danger. As well as this, they look like typical locations for a soap set in a town.

These are both quite main roads meaning that it could be tricky to film as it will be busy.  The left photo may look slightly too urban for our soap as you can see cranes in the background where as the houses in the right photo give more of a small community feel.

These alley ways could be the ideal location for something teenage related to occur as they are out of the way of any main roads.

This small forest area could be ideal for filming as a place for young children to play as it almost looks like a den.

  

We wanted to ensure that we used some public places to not only help set the scene but to make it seem as realistic as possible.

By choosing a variety of locations we would be able to target different audience types and ages, although, we had decided that our main audience would be within the range of 16 - 24 years old.

As a group, we went for a walk around one of the local estates to get inspiration for the name of our new soap.  Only after we had got back to school and looked over the photos we'd taken did we realise that we'd only chosen road names beginning with 'C'.  When discussing a name we had said that we didn't want anything that sounded too country like, as though our soap was set in a village, but a name that would reflect a soap set in a town.  Out of the photographs we had taken we decided that we prefered 'Conway' as it was fairly short, snappy and easy to pronounce and didn't soud like another word, like 'Corfe' did.

As a group we made a list of possible characters, as well as people to play them, making sure that we had all of the typical steroetypes.

We made a rough plan of how we wanted our opening sequence to be.

The main character is seen in the center of the drawing, he is either handcuffed or on drugs.  As he makes his way down the street characters are revealed down the side of the road and it cuts to flashbacks of involvement that this character has had with the various different people.  The possible reason for him being handcuffed is that his involement with all the other characters was things he shouldn't be doing. The second possibility, of being on drugs, is the reason behind his flashbacks as he sees the people.

Our original idea for our soap trailer was to have a male character walking down a street.  We thought that he could possible be handcuffed and be escorted by police, but then thought that we might not be able to ensure that it looked as realistic as we wanted it to.  We then thought that the character could be on drugs and, as he walks down the street, sees several people he knows; all being very stereotypical characters such as the thug, chav, slut, homosexual, matriarchal character and someone from a different ethnic background.  This is where we would put in flashbacks, as he sees them standing along the road he is walking down, showing that he has had some involvement in each of  their lives.  This would then hopefully entice the audience into watching the new soap as they would want to find out more about this character, and the details of their involvement with all the other characters.

Inspiration

Hollyoaks trailers - because they're quirky, include special effects and appeal particularly to a younger target audience.

Skins trailer - although Skins is a drama, and not a soap, the way it targets it's young adult audience is similar to Hollyoaks in the fact that its trailers are young, exciting and pacey, involving scenes which young people can relate to and would be interested in.

 

We created a mindmap of ideas as a group about a potential soap name, the target audience, setting and characters.