Storylines

We have just finished completing which storylines our trailer will include. We all looked at various soaps, such as Neighbours, Eastenders, Corrie, Emmerdale and Hollyoaks too look at which storylines are used in their soaps and see the comparisons between our soap. We found that soaps focus a lot on relationships, this is because their intended target audience is women and women like to watch various relationships. We classed this as a convention because it is common within soaps, therefore we decided to follow this convention and use a relationship narrative. We have included several relationship narratives, a couple in love, which will feature on our trailer for a couple of seconds because we don't want to give all our storylines away, we have done this to another couple as well because then it only gives our audience a sample of what is going to happen, leaving them wanting to find out more. Our main relationship storyline, is a couple who are also in love, but turns to a love triangle when another girl tries to get the boy as her boyfriend instead. This narrative takes a dark twist, as she begins to obsess and stalk the boy in her attempts to win him. We decided to take this twist because we wanted our soap to be different in the sense that there is humour involved, but also underlying messages as well. Our stalker storyline will feature in the trailer to show the audience our different edge.

We also decided on our name 'The Academy.' We have called our soap this because again, we are following the conventions of a soap, Eastenders is named after the place, Coronation street is named after the street, Byker Grove is named after the school. So although the actual place/school is not called the Academy, it is clear that this is a school and we are following the conventions because we are naming our soap what it is. It took a long time to come up with this idea as we were unsure of whether to name it the actual school, which is Hammersmith Academy, or just the Academy on it's on. We thought the Academy had more edge too it and was less long-winded then the Hammersmith Academy.

We are now researching other soap trailers to give us an idea of what to include/leave out/what to tease etc. We have spilt our groups up into two, to make it quicker for us to look up these codes and conventions, as we hope to get the most realistic trailer as possible.