Agenda plan

Method of learning

1-Introduction

- Introduce ourselves
- Rough outline of treatment


2-General conversation

- Talking to focus group
- Asking questions like "if they watch soap?"

3- Give out handouts

- Which includes information on soaps like Eastenders and coronation street, which also includes most popular storyline which has occurred in the soaps.

- Look through handout, to have a good understanding of the kind of event which occur in soaps.

- Look through the questions on the questionnaire and answer them one by one

4- Discuss violent story lines

- Talk abut the kind of gossip which happens in soaps and what effect does it have on our society today.

- Examples of violent storyline would be for example, Phil in Eastenders knocked out on the floor in blood.

Example of violent story lines

-Eastenders - The fact that every Christmas day someone dies on Eastenders i think really gives the soap a unrealistic view.

- For example-
1- so called "Dirty Den" comes back from the dead and returns to the soap after many years, creating a shocked appearance on the square and also on our screens.
He is later killed off the show by three women that he slept with, close to Christmas day.


-Coronation Street -Tony Gordon attempt to strangle Jed Stone with women's underwear, both of these characters were well respected before greed got in to the equation and also before the characters started arguing about money.

Debatable questions


- Why do soap use domestic violence in there shows?

- And do you think this would effect a young viewer? If yes in what way would it effect them?

New Trailer (Group effort)

Note: Each dialogue the boss speaks she will be wearing different clothes to show the different days that the redudencies were being announced.

Employee 1 - happy

"Hello"

lights cigarette

Employee 2 - confused

"So hows everyone working downstairs"

lights cigarette

drinks coffee

Employe 3 -nervous

*nodding* "It's a hard time now"

lights cigarette

drinks coffee

typing on keyboard

"I wanted to let you know"

lights cigarette

drinks coffee

typing on keyboard

puts cup to the side

Employee 4 - worried

"These are the expected figures"

lights cigarette

drinks coffee

typing on keyboard

puts cup to the side

"We can't afford to go the way we're going"

lights cigarette

drinks coffee

typing on keyboard

puts cup to the side

stubs cigarette out

Employee 5 - crying

"I'm going to have to let you go"

lights cigarette

drinks coffee

typing on keyboard

puts cup to the side

stubs cigarette out

Zooms out to Boss sitting in the chair completly exhausted

Verve House appears center stage as if being typed.

.End.

Poster idea (done by Serhan and Aslihan)

The first three posters show dominant female characters. We want to emphasize on this idea on our trailer on empowering women. It has elements of film noir because of the silhouettes and shadows. i think this is a good way in showing that there is a "dark side" to the business in some way. The idea of a woman holding a cigarette is quite good because of the masculine elements it has.

Group meeting

Agenda

Website preparation
-Asign tasks
Filming preparation-Asign tasks
Evaluation focus group
- group discussion

Minutes

Website
- What's being communicated (ideas, feelings or both)
- How its being acheived
- What is being sold
- How is this acheived
- Entertaining, Educationg, Marketing (combination of all three)
- Everyone must design a draft for the home page of our website and present this on:
Thursday 19/11/09

Focus group
-Agreed that the PA is not gay
- Show the main effects of the recession effecting the business. Showing the boss speaking with individuals about their redundency
- Accountant showing the balance sheets
- Boss shows order forms/estimated figures to employees

Filming
Due to our focus group we were informed about many things which we otherwise pressumed inacuratly. We shall present a small video to highlight the focus group discussion. This will be done after our filming.
Our original ideas for a trailer have no been changed. See other post for detailed specifics.

Treatment: Verve House (Group effort)

Verve House is an office set in north London which distributes clothing to major retail firms. The business is running successfully and employees would be classed as middle class, however there is a spectrum of classes used throughout the characters because of the mixed class society London is today. The boss, Aya, is the woman in charge. She wears a headscarf as it shows she's religious, we chose Islam as the religion of this character because of the current prejudices of western societies and the headscarf is a distinctive symbol of this religion, she is a representation of a strong dominant female as well as a representation of multi cultural London. She is intimidating towards the employees just as any other boss would be.

Some characters are homosexual; some are open about it whereas some keep it secret. In today’s society it is a norm to have any preferred sexuality. However, age and status may get in the way of this norm. The youngest character, the new girl, is homosexual, she is quite open about it; whereas Peter, the PA is married and has a family and feels as though he cannot reveal this about himself. This idea reflects how norms of society have changed rapidly over time.

The new girl character has a 3 month work placement from her university and her family background is from a working. Her role to the audience is to allow them to emphasise with her because she is new and everything would be introduced to her as well as everything being introduced to the audience. Her working class background represents the changing of this class identity, and that she is able to achieve a middle class background. This character also appeals to the younger audience because students would be able to emphasise with her.

The soap also features disabilities. The ‘sexy/handsome guy’ has a mental disorder - ADHD/ADD basically meaning Attention Deficit Disorder which summarises a lot of his characteristics; he has difficulty concentrating. He gets prescribed medication for this. He is accepted and quite popular within the workplace, his disorder does not make him a bizarre character because he has medication for it. It is quite common in the real world for some people to have similar mental disorders, even schizophrenia as long as it is manageable, and in this case: it is.

The representations are well suited for a busy city like London. It is quite normal for London to be multi-cultural and with people who have different views and preferences. Middle-class and students would be the target audience of this soap. Students would be attracted to the professional looking setting, just like the new girl, they would be interested in their future career and what it would be like. Middle classed audiences would be the main target audience. Middle classes are thought to be of high culture and education; they may be interested on the different representations of contemporary UK. Or, they could just be attracted to the narratives and characters.

All the different characteristics of the characters highlights that even in a crowded place like London, anyone can easily feel lonely.

location

This is a meeting room in our office location. It's hard to see due to the reflection from the lights but in the background you can see a large warehouse containing fashion garments and hundreds of boxes. We thought we may replicate this idea as a drafted idea for our own poster. Obviously it's less glamorous as Freefall as we thought to bring back down to Earth. It shows the real life industrial lifestyle, it also shows more dominance and gives off a mood of mischief and dodgy deeds.



If we decide as a group to go ahead and create a prototype developing this idea, i believe it will be an accurate representation of our soap.

poster draft

The program freeFall as huge resemblance to our soap so i thought it'd be worth looking at advertisements from them. The DVD cover was the same as the poster and it shows a high powered business man (white) standing in his office gazing out at his amazing view. This holds a lot of symbolism that's easily interpreted from the viewer. The man is very high up from the ground which can be a physical representation of his class in society, his possible bank balance and his egotistic character.



When visiting our location we had various idea's of having our poster in a similar style to this. It's very ambiguous, it features who you'll presume to be the main character. The colour schemes are not particularly eye catching so this may need adjusting. Like most posters the characters centralised it gives you a clear narrative image of the environment and it features the broadcaster.



We wouldn't follow this as our targeted audience will not be based in the center of London, we still wish to relate to our suburban viewers. This is due to the success of Eastenders so we thought to follow certain conventions with this soap in particular

Focus group research questions

1. What kind of soaps do you prefer watching and why?
2- Who your favourite character? And what does he make you feel?
3-What makes a film realistic in your view?

4- What events which are occurring in real life, do you think would be good if it was turned into a tv program?

5- As we just explained in our treatment, we will be having odd characters from society, is there anyone round the business who you are suspicious of, wherever its gay behaviour or just weirdness?

6-Would you watch a soap that has a strong reality for example, real scenarios based around the recession?

7- Is there any part of reality you wouldn’t like to see in soaps?

8- The Muslim culture is often mentioned as terrorist organisation, what’s you personally opinion about this? (Because as you know one of our main characters is a boss of a major firm)


9-The recent downfall of all major firms due to recession , i.e. Woolworth , marks & Spencer and many more firms, do you think this has opened a gap in the film industry to take advantage of? Also do you think this should be taken advantage of?

10-Sexual behaviour something which is always effective, in soaps and films, a women is always used to attract the male audience, do you think using sexy guys would attract the female?

11- In your opinion which gender is soap mainly aimed out? Why?

12-Why do they have a main meeting point? (For example in Eastenders you got the pub) What does it enable the audience watching to capture?

Written by Serhan Velettin

Dirty Den Watts death (Focus group research)

More than 14 million people saw "Dirty" Den Watts killed off on Friday, marking EastEnders' 20th anniversary, according to unofficial figures.
Den's death came 16 years after he was supposedly shot in 1989. But he came back to the show in September 2003.
The audience for BBC One's one-hour special averaged 13.7 million and peaked at 14.2 million in the last 15 minutes, overnight figures showed.
Den died after being confronted by Zoe, Chrissie and Sam in the Queen Vic.

If the ratings are confirmed, the episode will have given the soap its highest audience for a year.
The overnight figures showed almost 60% of the viewing public tuned into EastEnders between 2000 and 2100 GMT, leaving ITV1 with about 13%.
"We are very pleased with the figures," a BBC spokesman said. "It shows viewers have really enjoyed the story of Den's demise."




1- So called Dirty Den Watts, was a gangster figure in the soap, doing what ever he wanted, sleeping with as many girls has he wanted, he never ever took no as a answer. Near enough to christmas day he is killed by three women, i think the soap trys to show female dominates by the gangster figure being beaten down by a women. Thanks to this storyline as you can see from the review bbc's ratings went to a record high level, Den watts coming back from the dead raised alot of eyebrows, with da soap becoming unrealistic.

poster idea

When we visited the location we began brainstorming some potential poster ideas. Walking in through the glass doors you see the name of the company in silver letters above the reception desk. I took this picture as a basic draft, we thought we could have Aya/the boss standing from the balcony looking down at the character in a stance that shows power and control.
By having Aya central to the screen above the title of the programme it follows a simplistic layout form which is a common convention from other posters we've seen. It shows a clear message of status, it can relate to many people has statistics say over half of employees feel intimidated or are bullied by their employer. Overall it has a striking effect, i think there's a concurrent colour theme. We could developing the framing better and digitally edit the colours.
Things for us to think about would be what slogans, if any, would we want to feature and where to position it.

Storyboard planning/research

Today we arrived at our primary location (the offices) this helped us all to gain a better understanding of the enviroment and inspired us to think creatively of how we're to shoot this trailer. It put into perspective we may need more characters to play apart as secondary characters/extras.


IDEAS:

-Serhan playing Peter can have chipped nail polish on his nails, only very slightly to convey an enigmatic narrative to viewers. It could mean his young daughter wanted to paint one or it could be his cheeky secret that he may like to paint his own nails as apart of his secret (he's gay and hiding).

- To link all the characters together and symbolic show that they all have an important role within the business we've thought to have a folder/documents passed round to all characters. We may begin a shot with a close up of Peter/serhans hands flicking through a filing cabinet to look for these important documents for their weekly board meeting. This will establish the setting for the audience.

- Another opening idea was that the new girl can arrive through the doors at reception, this will reflect the audience stepping into this new territory. The reception is one of the more glamorous areas and this can give a contradicting message, although the audience would only find out the business is not all it appears once they've entered. This can be be enigmatic and attractive to some viewers.

-Yet another opening idea could be Aya sitting upon her throne although her back is turned away from the camera and you only see this grand office chair. The chair can then turn still concealing her identity. You'll then see Aya's shoes/heels walking down the long corridor towards the confrence room. She'll then enter late as all other employee's are waiting patiently for the bosses arrival.

- We could have everyone gossiping in the meeting room before Aya comes in as we're aware gossip is a huge element to soaps, althought for a trailer we must highlight a dramatic storyline to capture the audiences interest.

- We're exciting about all the potential opening scenes and could feature all of them. Once Serhan finds the documents he could then beginning handing them round to all staff members around the table. This will allow us to film each character and highlight there main characteristics. Aya could eventually enter late being the last one to read the document. She can then reveal these secrete work documents. She can take them out and it large font the name of our soap either Verve House or Southbury Rd can be shown as well as negative bank statements. The camera can zoom out intoconvention soap form and there present upon the table newspapers feturing headlines about the recession or specific business failure.

- Be presenting all the characters at the table we're hoping audience's can find atleast one that they're intrigued by eg; the good looking sexy man, they may begin speculating he'll have an affair with Aslihan as we may chose to show them to staring at each other. But on Aslihan's arrival we can show her 'giving-the-eye' to the female receptionist, this will be one storyline we'll breifly introduce viewers with and it may be enough to want to make viewers tune in.

-As Aslihan walks into the building the tramp can be sitting just outside the main entrance or can be hiding in the car park. This may be enough to make viewers question why there's a tramp there. We could represent him to be rather shifty and intimidating, or generally dirty and degrading to the image of the business. However we chose to repsent this character, viewers make be rather shocked and would be interested to find out why he's there, weather he's allowed or maybe wondering if further action will be taken to remove him etc.

-When Serhans rustling through the files before the meeting he can comment on the nail polish, this again will hopefully cause questioning from viewers....Enigmatic storylines are a key convention to soaps and to trailers of all kinds and are focus at the moment is to present enough vague stories to appeal to a large audience without diverting from the realism of the situations.

Enigma's are key to attracting viewers to tune in, when filming a trialer it doesn't neccesserily represent the style of how the soap would normally be represented. This trailer we're planning, in terms of filming style and general narrative structure, is an exception to the normal conventions of soaps. If we were to film a scene from our soap then we would follow the tradionaly structures such as avoiding the close ups/abstrast representations and heavy symbolism.

Research:Posters

It is not surprising that Hollyoaks unlike the majority of other soaps uses posters, as it is an unconventional soap; different to other soaps. When analysing the poster i realised that Hollyoaks used the fact that it was different as a highlight for their poster and were proud of that.....


















The poster is mocking other soaps such as Eastenders and Coronation Street for their emphasis on pubs and perhaps for having a pub as the dominant central meeting point in their soap, through it featuring pubs and drunken people negatively. Hollyoaks is shown in the poster, as not being about drunken people in pubs like other conventional soaps but about young, glamorous, sophisticated characters. And so the image presented is a real one as shown through their annual calendar which features airbrushed, athletic, sexy, well presented characters and the soaps emphasis on student life.

*Throughout the whole poster there is a theme of spot the difference almost. This is clever not only because it takes the same format at spot the difference games in magazines, which the young target audience of Hollyoaks will be regularly read and so they will be attracted by this, but also because straight away it represents other soaps negatively whilst appearing positive and ‘better than the rest’.

The second image is intended to be everything that Hollyoaks represents, such as glamour, brightness and clever ideas as well as being different. Therefore, straight away when audiences look at the poster they will straight away draw a comparison which will put the second image as a better option. As a result the individual will begin to watch Hollyoaks rather than other soaps because the poster shows them to be not good enough and far less appealing.
*It can also be argued that Hollyoaks uses class to appeal to audiences and uses this as one of its criticisms of conventional soaps like Eastenders and Coronation Street. This is because the poster representing Hollyoaks is far better mannered and neatly represented. This is shown through the couple fighting who are shown in the second poster as Latin dancing, and the dog that is urinating on the carpet is shown neatly brushed in pink, eating from its plate.