Agenda: What do we want our Soap Opera trailer to communicate to the audience?
Present at meeting: Demetri, Mus & Saul
Person recording minutes: Demetri
Start time: 2.13 PM
End time:
Demetri: What do we all want to represent with this Soap Opera trailer we’re making?
Mus: I think we need to make a trailer that represents something more experimental than conventional Soap.
Demetri: Something that stands out?
Saul: That’s true, Soaps are all similar but we need to stick to having traditional Soap Opera elements otherwise it’ll be classified as a Drama or something along the lines.
Demetri: I agree with both of you, I’d rather make a Soap Opera trailer that shows a more experimental approach to the genre but still manages to stay in the guidelines of traditional Soap conventions.
Mus: We need to work out how we’re going to get that balance.
Saul: It shouldn’t be too hard once we have a solid idea of how we want our Soap, at the moment we can’t be too specific because we haven’t established characters, script etc.
Mus: We should just establish a general set of ideas of how we want our Soap to be, once it comes to establishing characters we can work with these ideas.
Demetri: I think as far as traditional Soap Opera conventions are concerned, we need to display parallel storylines that show typical elements such as relationships, affairs, confrontation etc, a sense of community and the mise en scene that you would expect to see in a Soap Opera.
Saul: Don’t forget realism, shot types and editing.
Mus: Realism is an important factor; we can engage the audience by basing our trailers narrative of things the audience can relate to. Like you said Demetri, relationships, affairs and confrontation. We can also try and include current affairs in our trailer. As for shot types and editing, it’s a trailer so we don’t have to be close to home with the genre, we can push the boundaries.
Saul: That’s a good point, I think a good way to make our Soap stand from others is by giving a different target audience as well as viewing schedule to others. If we take all we know about the genre and adapt it to a younger audience, say late teens to late twenties and put it on a channel such as E4 we’ll have something that stays within the Soap Opera conventions and stands out by appealing to an audience of its own.
Demetri: Yeah, I agree, that’s what we need to focus on if we want our Soap to be different from others. Target audience is a key element and if we focus on changing that that instead of conventions such as parallel storylines then this will all go to plan.
*End of minutes*
