1. 1. In what ways does your media product use, develop,
or challenge forms and conventions of real media
products?

2. For our media production we decided to create a new
soap opera. As a group we had to do thorough
research into the genre of soap operas and compare
the similarities and differences between different
soaps. We also looked into the forms and conventions
in soap operas.
The main soap operas we looked at were Eastenders,
Coronation street and Hollyoaks.

3. We each did a textual analysis on a soap to help us
further understand the conventions seen within soaps.
From our research we decided to create a soap which
was both social realist and light entertainment, this is
similar to Hollyoaks.
We wanted a soap
which would appeal
to our target
audience by being
interesting and
dramatic but in a
light hearted way.

4. For our stock characters we used the typical
conventional characters that you would find in any soap,
but to make sure our audience didn’t think that we had
just copied characters from other soaps we challenged
them too. The characters which have the main
storylines at the present time were highlighted in our
trailer by focusing on their faces and sometimes with a
flash back to what their life is like.
Some of the characters we see
include Luke, played by David
Garcia, we see him smiling at
the party, then it flashes back to
him being violent towards his
girlfriend. Abuse is something
that teenagers can go through
but it is not widely talked about.

5. In our soap we want to cover issues that teenagers can be
effected by e.g. abuse, bullying, relationships. Through the
story line we want to show that it can be dealt with and
that there are other people in similar positions.
However as said before we want to make it light hearted
so the stories won’t all be dramatic in a bad way. We tried
to add some light heartedness into our trailer by having a
party scene included. This is something that happens
often in teenagers lives so they can easily relate to it.

6. Some of the other characters
we see in our trailer include
someone doing cocaine,
drugs are often used among
teenagers so teenagers
could relate.
Another is a girl being sick,
nearly every party includes
someone being sick so we
thought by including these
our viewers with relate better
to it.

7. All soaps are set around a community,
for example Hollyoaks is set around a
town called Chester and we also
wanted to have one. We decided that
our characters would connected by
going to Holloway Halls. Having a
university will also help engage and
attract our target audience of 16-34
year olds. This is because the majority
of our audience our will either be
looking to go to university, be at
university or recently left, this will help
attract our audience by it being in a
setting that the majority will be able to
relate to easily.
We will have more than one trailer and each trailer will show
different characters and their storylines. This way we can also
target the different trailers at different audiences e.g. male and
females, teenagers and young adults.