1. ‘ There is ... a ... subtle sense in which soaps can be considered instructive. Since they concentrate on inter-personal relations ... set in a social and political milieu intended to parallel the surrounding society, they can hardly fail to send messages about appropriate or expected behaviour. ‘ There is ... a ... subtle sense in which soaps can be considered instructive. Since they concentrate on inter-personal relations ... set in a social and political milieu intended to parallel the surrounding society, they can hardly fail to send messages about appropriate or expected behaviour.
2. As shown by the table above women tend to watch soaps more then men with a male% of 14 and a female% of 38 to the statement ‘I really enjoy watching soaps.’ This shows that our target audience should mainly focus on a female audience, as generally women are the main audience to watch soaps. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:SLYNL0K2AOAJ:www.ofcom.org.uk/static/archive/bsc/pdfs/research/soap.pdf+soap+opera+audience&hl=en&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESjGr5yXr66spH4dvYsRHsERm9cwPv-BzXaaKtwwZj33DEUTOng KOnLaJtqU9rbmc9Guh3G2zSuPe04I0aMZmfQZQ9p_NgrveKbHP7c_BA2yfA0vpOpXYRUvj02gS-vC3LnvMWY&sig=AHIEtbTEGoeYcRPCyXdk4XU_AtQcCzsC4A We can also tell by the table that an audience aged 15-29 watch soaps more than any other age group. We will take this into consideration as we want a maximum audience response.
3. Target Audience We are aiming our production to a younger audience than most soaps, Ages 15-30. We hope that by incorporating contemporary issues in our soap we will attract a wide range of our target audience. For example, the storyline of one of the character, Claire, who represents the stereotype of the bitchy woman whose mother is a hopeless alcoholic and drug user. This allows Claire to seem a fully rounded complete person with difficult home issues which contrast with her hard public exterior. This allows the audiences to sympathise with her character. We are trying to promote awareness with these current issues that many young people have heard about or have to cope with. We also think that by using a young cast we will appeal to a younger audience because they will all face problems that people of that age face, such as friendship difficulties, relationships and problems with parents.
4. The table shows that the top 3 soaps are Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale. In terms of these soaps we recognised that the characters had their own counterparts, which fall into stereotypes. We wanted to achieve something new and different - a soap that does not draw upon these stereotypes. The ideology of this soap is more like Hollyoaks. Which already has a large youth audience.
5. Representation of youth culture. When Hollyoaks use stereotypes they balance it with countertypes, because of the impressionable audience. - We really like this idea and have decided to adapt it to our soap as characters such as Bella (the quiet one) and Claire (the bitchy one) are complete opposites. Coronation Street has more stereotypical characters, for example over the top gay people, this appeals to an older audience. - We have looked at this idea and took elements from it as our target audience is ranged from 15-30 and we want our soap to appeal to the older audience as well as the younger. Therefore we focus on the six main characters home life including Charles (the funny one) who was adopted by two gay men. Youths in soaps often appear dangerous and unpredictable. - We have took this into consideration so we plan to make a few characters seem this way so some audiences won’t like them but they also might sympathise with them as they act they way they do because of their life situations. For example Claire (the bitchy one) she can be very nasty at times to other characters, but then we see her life at home with her alcoholic mother and her father who has given up hope and hopefully the audience would then start to sympathise with her. After researching more into Hollyoaks we found that classroom scenes are used to help represent youth culture. - We plan to use this idea as the soap will be partially based around school life, so in order to represent youth culture we want to show how students act in class, covering all aspects of this we have different characters such as Bella (the quiet one) who enjoys studying, Charles (the funny one) who is naturally very clever and Claire (the bitchy one) who rebels against education most of the time.
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7. Taking everything into account. Our six main character are all white British citizens, to represent reality of ‘urban’ Britain we plan to bring different characters of different ethnic origin into the sub-plots. For example, an Indian family moving next door, or employment of a mixed raced teacher etc… As we have all grown up in a culture surrounded mainly by white people we wanted to include this within our soap, by doing this we can show how different people react and adapt to change within their society like we have had to. We have also thought about bringing different youth groups into the soap. Although there are a strong group of friends in the soap, they are all going to be very different, interested in their own things, and have their own views. This allows us to change character profiles. For example Janie (the deceiving one) could represent the ‘emo’ which is a youth sub-culture and we can show the problems and solutions this may cause.
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10. Our production company logo We decided on Urban Kick Media as we wanted it to appeal to our target audience, which is primarily 15-30 age group. To create the logo we imported an image from the internet of a foot and edited it using Photoshop and added the bubble around the foot and changed the colours. We decided on green camouflaged writing as we felt this image worked with the ‘Urban’ theme of our logo. The word Urban has connotations of today's towns and cities. Kick because our logo needed to be strong and powerful, and Media as our logo is apart of the media industry. We felt this achieved all the points we wanted to make.
