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

media products?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.