Minutes for fifth group meeting

General filming discussions

Friday 30th October 2009

Start time: 7:30pm

People present: Natalie Michael, Thegla Savvides and Natalie Nicolaides

We began by deciding we wanted to make a start with our TV guide magazine front cover.

• We then decided we wanted who would take on the role as the main character – we decided on Thegla.
• Next was the discussion about how we wanted the main picture on our cover to look. We decided on the victim as the main image in the foreground and the possible murderers in the background. It was settled that Natalie Michael would be the Victim and she would be dressed in white (to symbolise innocence or a coat to symbolise closure). The suspects in the background will be wearing something red to represent the danger.
• We selected a day that we would take a photo. We decided we would take these photos in school as we are going to be using photoshop to change the background of them.
• Our next main discussion was as to who would be filling out which pre-production forms we would each be completing.
• Next on the agenda were the locations we would be filming in. These included; -the house (Natalie M’s house), the cafe, a supermarket, the streets, the place where the girl bunks, a park and a kitchen.
• We finally discussed possible people who could act as the extra people.

Finish time: 8:05pm

Written by Natalie Michael

Minutes for fourth group meeting

Discussing our Tv guide cover

Thursday 22nd October 2009

Start time: 2:10pm

People present: Natalie Michael, Thegla Savvides and Natalie Nicolaides

• We began by drawing out a draft of how we want our cover to look.
  We planned where we wanted everything to be placed and how we wanted out title. We decided we wanted out title to be in the top left corner and we wanted it to be placed inside a TV.
• We then discussed possible titles for our cover. These included:
  -Teleh
  -Just TV
  -TV Rush
  -Ultimate TV
  -TV Revealed
  -TV World
  -Big Mouth

Finish time: 2:40

Written by Natalie Michael

Written Storyboard for Trailer

We have drawn up our storyboard for our trailer (names of characters still to be decided). We decided we wanted our trailer to be unconventional using the recent Eastenders trailer with Peggy and Archies wedding and Hollyoaks trailers as inspiration. It will go as follows:

• Close up of girl 1 crying with make up running down her face
• She closes her eyes to a heartbeat sound
• Close up of the first note on the floor 'We'
• Scene fades to letters coming through the letter box
• The note with 'We' falls out from in between the letters.
• Close up of girl 1 with her hands on her head. she closes her eyes to a heartbeat
• Close up of the second note on the floor 'Know'
• Girl 1 sitting in a cafe
• A waitress brings her a drink and hands her a note from someone
• Girl 1 reads the note but audience do not see it.
• She looks around in the hope of seeing who it is from but the cafe is empty
• Close up of her hands covering more of her face and the sound of her whimpering
• Close up of the third note on the floor 'What'
• When girl 1 gets home from the cafe she looks in her bag and sees the third note
• Close up of the girls face, tears rolling down
• Close up of the 4th note on the floor 'You'
• Girl 1 sitting on her floor doing homework, as she lifts up a folder, the fourth note falls out from it.
• Close up of the girl crying
• Fifth note on the floor 'Did'
• Girl 1 in supermarket she gets her purse out to pay and the 5th note falls from it.
• Girl in her bedroom putting the notes together
  'WE KNOW WHAT YOU DID'
• The tempo/pace of the music increases as she puts the notes in order one by one. The music stops as they are put in order and a cardiac arrest beep comes on.
• The scene flashes to a dead body
• I.V appears on screen with the days and time the soap is on - 'Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at 8pm
• Final sound of a heart beat then silence as the trailer ends.

Group effort. Written by Natalie Michael drawn by Thegla Savvides

Written Storyboard for Episode 1

We have drawn our storyboard for part of our first episode (names of characters still to be decided). It will go as follows:

Scene 1

• Girl 1 in kitchen eating breakfast. She gets a text saying 'Are you in today? x'
• Her mum appears in the doorway saying 'hurry up or you are going to be late'
• Girl 1 walks out and slams the front door whilst her mum is still talking
• Girl 1 walking down the road

Scene 2

• Girlfriend and boyfriend walking down the street together talking
• close up of the girlfriend looking uneasy whilst the boyfriend is still talking to her
• close up of the boyfriend looking down at his girlfriend with a smile on his face

Scene 3

• Boy 1 cooking his breakfast, his phone rings
• He talks on the phone saying 'yeah I'm going to be late again'

Scene 4

• Girl 1 smoking in the street
• A group of girls walk past her, they say hi, one asks girl 1 for a cigarette
• She passes her one
• Girls say thanks and walk on
• Close up of girl 1 smiling
  

Group effort. Written by Natalie Michael. Drawn by Natalie Michael and Thegla Savvides

Final draft of Treatment

Our soap opera will have a mixture of short and long term storylines which will all run concurrently with each other. This will allow the audience to get to know the variety of characters. Some of the less important storylines will be short term, only lasting for the period of one episode. The long-term storylines will run for perhaps two episodes with the effects of it lasting for the episodes to come. This will allow the audience to possibly connect to the characters that are having similar life events to them and may possible use the way the characters react to it to influence the way they deal with their own problems.

The characters in our soap are going to be mainly teenagers of both genders. We also hope to include the families of the teenagers and some of the teachers working at the school. The characters we are hoping to focus on include a “gossip”, a “dodgy geezer” who supplies drugs to others, a group who have parties and do not focus on school, “geeks” who focus on school work, “lower class” people who may be considered “chavs”, good-looking males who all the girls fancy and a mysterious new character who is known as an outcast to the others as they are new to the setting. They will be new only at the start but will not completely fit in as all the groups have already been formed between the characters that have been together for a longer period of time. This “new” character will be picked on and included into groups for particular reasons and then will be shut out. The main characters in the soap will change as the storyline does, one story will evolve around one group/character whilst in a different week it will change.

Our soap opera will be based in a school setting, including the classrooms, library, staff room and the playground. We will also include the homes of the characters and their local areas. The homes will be used so the audience can get an insight into the lives of the characters and the homes may also be used to hold parties. We will have a meeting place where all the characters go; this may possibly be a café. We may also include the park as many teenagers hang around in the park.

Our target audience is going to be teenagers and young adults of both genders as our characters are mainly of this age group too. By having teenagers as our target audience and as the main characters, we hope the audience will be able to connect with the characters and possibly relate their own lives to the characters. We also hope that our soap will appeal to an older group of people and that they will be attracted to the issues we will be dealing with.

As our soap is aimed at teenagers and we will have moral and educational content.
Our media product will follow the expected and unexpected elements of a soap opera. It will include all the necessary conventions of a soap opera such as narrative enigmas, a sense of realism, concurrent storylines, social representations, and a central meeting point and will deal with real life issues. Each episode will end with a big cliff-hanger and the storylines can sometimes end with smaller cliff-hangers. We will also challenge everyday conventions of soaps by having events such as a lesbian wedding, a teacher getting in trouble instead of a student and a person not fitting into a tight community.

We decided on the name I.V for our soap. This will stand for Independent Variable. We believe this fits into the nature of our soap as the definition of an independent variable is a variable that gets manipulated in order for the outcome to be different each time. The lives of the characters will get manipulated by other characters and by social factors in order for outcomes of the soap to be interesting and to keep audiences watching.

Group Effort. Written by Natalie Michael with contributions from Thegla Savvides and Elena Christodoulou

Analysis of Neighbours website

Analyising a website will allow us, as a group, to base our website on successful soap websites taking the good points of it and developing the negative.

http://www.neighbours.com/
Entering this website you are given the option as to whether you want to enter the 'official Australian' site or the 'official UK' site, both leading to website about the soap. This page has a few pictures of the characters which are seen during the opening credits. There is also an image of a landscape of Australia with a Ramsey Street scene name sticking up from it. The welcome sign gives the site a friendly feel to it.

The Australian site:
The home page has the 'Ramsey Street' street sign in the top left hand corner. This flowed from the same sign we saw on the first page we were taken to. There are 9 options on the home page along the bar at the top. This includes:

• home
• video
• episodes
• characters
• forums
• music
• photos
• interact
• competitions

Under these options is a slide show showing events that are happening in the soap and to the characters' lives. this includes photos from:

• last episode
• next episode
• news
• declans diary
• photo gallery
• video
• E.P corner (executive producer)

Each section has an image and text, clicking on the image takes you to that page on the site where you can read/ see more.

Under the 'favourite' section visitors to the site can choose from a selection of links:

• most recent/most popular episodes
• latest fans
• characters by residence
• neighbours quiz
• latest news
• vote here
• hot forum topics
• download own wallpaper

There is also a section called 'tour and merchandise. This gives people the chance to tour the Neighbours set and meet the characters. A selection of tours can be chosen each with different prices and the option to take a free tour. This will draw in visitors to the site. There are images of people, who have taken the tour, with the characters and they are holding the 'Ramsey Street' road sign. There is an image of the tour bus with times of departure.


From each of the links at the top of the page a number of fun and interesting sections can be revealed.

VIDEO:
This section allows the audience to feel part of the Neighbours world and see the characters in a different way to how they would see them during the show. The videos are not available to UK viewers. This is an advantage to the Australian viewers.

EPISODES:
This has a selection of previous episodes and the next episode. This makes sure the audience cant miss out.


CHARACTERS:
When the audience select a character from the scrolling bar at the top, the audience are taken to the page of that character. This page gives information about the character. The audience can read up on the life of that character and possibly feel as thought they are getting to know the character.

FORUMS:
'Welcome to the Neighbours community' is written above the forum topics. This is friendly for the audience.

MUSIC:
'Songs from Neighbours classic episodes and your favourite stars!'. Clicking on this takes you to a page with the words:
'After an overwhelming number of requests from "Neighbours" fans, Grundy Television in collaboration with Sony Music have put together this fantastic collection of music from the show.'
The fact that this shows that the fans are listened to would make them feel special and they will still remain faithful to Neighbours as a soap as they would feel part of the 'family'.

PHOTOS:
There is a slide show and a choice of groups of episodes to see the pictures from. This will allow the audience to see memorable moments from the episodes of their favourite characters.


INTERACT:
There are 4 main sections on this page; trivia, timeline, fan messaging and wallpapers. These all allow the audience to feel part of the nieghbours community even more.

COMPETITIONS:
'Lots of promotions and great prizes can be found with the click of a button! Good luck'
These words are found when you first enter the competition page. They are friendly and it does not sound too formal which would let the audience feel comfortable on the site.

= In my opinion, the Australian site is very successful as it is friendly, easy to use and has enough links and things to do so that the visitor to it does not get bored. A true Neighbours fan would enjoy this site. I hope that within my group we can take examples from this successful site in order to make ours successful too.

THE UK SITE:
This site takes us to the holysoap website which gives information on all the soap operas, British and Australian. This has a similar layout to the Australian one and has similar features for the UK audience to enjoy. It includes:

• full episodes
• clips
• news and gossip
• pictures
• cast
• extras

These links all have similar things as the Australian site does. Again, I believe this site is as successful as the Australian one.

In order for our website to be successful too it has to be easy to use, friendly and have enough aspects of it which will keep the visitor interested.

Newspaper article on Neighbours

I found this article about Neighbours which talks about how the change from BBC1 to Channel 5 has secured more viewers and has been more successful than people originally thought it would be. This article was written in 2008.

Channel Five's £300m "big bet" on the "Neighbours effect" is showing signs of paying off with the Australian soap helping boost the network's adult audience share by 13% in the three weeks since it switched from BBC1.
Five, which had a 5.2% audience share in the first six weeks of the year, has seen its share climb to an average of 5.9% since the show launched on February 11.
Gerhard Zeiler, the chief executive of Channel Five's parent company RTL, admitted today that the acquisition of the show - pinched from the BBC last year in a 10-year £300m deal - was a gambit to help halt a decline in adult audience share from 5.9% in 2006.
"It was a big bet to secure Neighbours for Five. It seems the bet management took has really paid off," Zeiler said.
Five, which has secured Weight Watchers as the first-ever sponsor of Neighbours, recorded an adult audience share boost of one percentage point to 6.2% in the first week the show aired.
The launch of the show helped Five pull in its best weekly ratings in over a year.
In the subsequent two weeks Five's share has slipped back slightly to 5.8% and 5.7% respectively.
However, in the three weeks following the launch of Neighbours, Five has enjoyed a healthy boost to an average 5.9% share of audience, a 13% increase compared to the six weeks prior to the debut of the show.
Five executives will be hoping the slight slip in audience share in the weeks since Neighbours launched is not an indication that the novelty factor may have worn off and that a significant audience boost will slip away.
Zeiler said he expected Five's audience share would end up being "up significantly" this year and that there would be "further significant growth" in digital services Five Life and Five US.
He added that despite the current economic climate there was "no reason to be pessimistic" about advertising sales, although the company "remained cautious".

• From this I have learnt that the channel in which a soap is aired upon is very important as this will determine how many viewers it will get.

Minutes for third group meeting

Discussing locations and the treatment

Thursday 8th October 2009

Start time: 2:10pm

People present: Natalie Michael, Elena Christodoulou, Thegla Savvides and Natalie Nicolaides

• We began by discussing what types of locations we would need for the specific moments we want to film for our trailer.
• We decided upon a school which led to us needing corridors and a classroom.
• A bedroom
• A central meeting point which we then decided we wanted to be a cafe.
• We then discussed the advantages and disadvantages of these locations
• Included in the advantages were; a school is easily accessible for us to film in as we have access to classrooms and corridors and included in the disadvantages was whether we would be able to film in a cafe and we then discussed that we would have to get permission from a cafe owner before filming there.
• To overcome the cafe problem we decided that we could create a cafe in one of our gardens and get people to pose as a waitress and customers.
• We then went through our treatment together as a group and discussed what we could include in each section.
• We also went through the tasks we had set each other from our previous meeting and gave new ones to each other.
• We discussed having to complete location recce forms, risk assessments, production schedules, shooting schedules and scripts and any booking forms for equipment and rooms

Finish time: 2:50

Written by Natalie Michael

Minutes for second group meeting

Discussing character types, ideas for trailer and story boarding first episode.

Tuesday 6th October

Start Time: 11:06am

People Present: Elena Christodoulou, Thegla Savvides, Natalie Michael, Natalie Nicolaides

• As a group we first discussed different character types that we think would appeal to our target audiences, We began mapping out different characteristics that individually appealed to us.
• Some ideas where a posh character that doesnt look posh, bad looking characters who are very well behaved, The popular girls and the misfits.
• We discussed numerous ideas for the trailer, one of us comes up with an idea and by the end we all have had an input.
• Some of the ideas for our trailer, we've elaborated upon and decided it for the first episode, allowing us to leave numerous cliff hangers in the trailer and prolong them onto the episode.
• We asked ourselves many questions like...Is the trailer going to be a spoiler of an unrealistic scene-e.g. like at the beginning of Hollyoaks with the supernatural and flashbacks etc.
• We also set each other targets in order for things to all be completed in time and in order, keeping us up to date.
• We discussed a few locations, and the advantages and disadvantages of these.
• Some of the ideas we came up with, where more of a challenge than others we discussed how we would work around certain problems and in some cases lack of required props, i.e. recording in a shop-copyrighting issues- and our main idea of having a clear board for characters thoughts.

Finish Time: 12:20pm

Group Effort. Written by Elena Christodoulou

Review of Neighbours

Reviews about soaps can allow people to form opinions without even watching it. People have mixed views about a soap including criticisms and positive feedback

• 'Neighbors' features poor acting and bad storylines'
  
• Neighbours is my life along with home and away. They are fake but yet so real. Once you start watching neighbours you just can't stop it is additive,in a good way. Thy way it is directed is incredible it makes you feel that the events happening in the episode are happening right beside you,it is very believable. The actors and actresses in it know just how to play the roll of the character they are playing and make it very believable and realistic. Neighbours is a show that can get your attention very easily and I would recommend it to anyone at anytime.'
  
• 'This show is the best. It makes you cry and be sad but it also makes you happy in some ways. This is a awesome show and everyone knows it is the best. I end by saying the only words that can describe this show "The best show ever made on Earth."'
  
• This show (without doubt) is popular, and why is it popular? I intend to argue that it is the sheer quality that has brought this show to its extreme popular standing which it now holds in many nations. One only has to do a quick scan of a neighbours forum to see just how many and how extremely intent the viewers are. There are many intense forums which are both criticising and proving that this show is so great.'
  
• 'Neighbors is definitely the only soap that i allow myself to watch. The show is quite dramatic and a lot of stuff happens in such short periods of time. But then again that is what a soap is. Neighbors is one of those shows that you get hooked to and i have been watching it for the past 3-5 years. The actors and actresses aren't spectacular but there have definitely been some pretty talented people come out of the show. Take Kylie Minogue for example. To all those soapie lovers out there choose Neighbors over Home & Away and you will not regret it.'
  
• 'It's a great drama, helped by the fact that it has a huge cast, meaning there are always a lot of different, varied storylines going on at the same time, so you'll never get bored with what's going on. The great thing about the show is that it mixes drama with some light-hearted comedy every now again. The dramatic storylines are truly enthralling (like the fire in Lassiters), while the comical scenes can be quite amusing too (think of some the more recent episodes!).Overall, it's a fantastic show, and definitely worth watching!'
  
• 'Neighbours is a great show, full of drama'
  
• 'Getting worse'

From these reviews, it is easy to see what most viewers enjoy from a soap. They enjoy drama, good storylines that are believable and realistic so we can take this and incorporate it into our planning for our soap to ensure it will be successful.