Treatment

Treatment- Group effort written up by Anna Constantinou

The main idea for our soap opera is a culture clash in a small area. The point of the culture clash is that with two different cultures conflicting, there would be a lot of drama to portray to an audience over a long period of time which would make it a success. There is a lot of culture clash in the world we live in today where people from different backgrounds do not always see eye to eye and find it very difficult to understand each others’ cultures and religions. This is not always the case, however, something small; for example, romance between two people of different religions, or arguments about how people should dress cause conflict, and this makes it an issue in our lives today and it always has been. It is usually the older generation which enforces the tradition which they feel their children must obey, but young people and our generation seem to crave difference and change, and this is what will allow our audience, which will consist mainly of older teenagers and young adults, to understand our storylines on a personal level.

The overall view of our soap is basically English or non religious family conflicting with a religious family such as Indian or Greek. This would provide the ideal basis for a conflict clash in a small area. It would be better to use a small area rather than a larger one because it would then be easier to focus on the two families and the world around them rather than the world with two families conflicting within it. It is not 100% clear about the details of our characters, but we are basically going to have a gay or lesbian character from a religious family who is forbidden to be gay or lesbian because of how religious they are and is not yet aware of their sexuality and has not yet told anyone about it. There is going to be the friend of the gay/lesbian character who is actually religious, but at the same time, a ‘’live and let live’’ sort of character. The religious family will be new to the area, or the non religious new to the area (what ever one benefits us depending on what characters we can pull off). There is going to be the parents of the two characters, and the boyfriend of the religious friend who agrees with her about not having sex until they are married. There will be the non religious family with an openly gay/lesbian daughter/son and a friend of this person who is also non- religious. There will also be the not- so important characters, but these are not very clear. There will need to be a sense of community, and for that, there will need to be a mixture of characters, but for now, we are focusing on the main ones.

The small stories we have decided upon for the episodes are:

*celibate girl gets pregnant (drink gets spiked and she gets raped)
*love triangle (jealousy and turning against each other)
*cheating affair (needing company turns into something more unintentionally)
*suicide (a history of grief…flashbacks)
*drug addicts (relief- influence)

*At a party, the friend of the gay/lesbian religious character, who has agreed with her boyfriend not to have sex until they are married, is drinking with her friends and without realising, while she is dancing, has her drink spiked by a stranger. Completely drugged and not realising what is happening, the girl is lead into a room without anyone noticing and is raped. The next morning when she wakes up, she remembers nothing about it and thinks it is because she has had too much to drink. A few months later, when she checks the calendar, she realises she must be pregnant, but has no idea how until she starts to remember bit by bit what happened, in her dreams.

*With two boys and a girl, both are infatuated by the girl’s charming quirky character and beauty, but which one will win her heart? Or will she refuse both of them and go for another?

*A woman who’s husband is hardly ever home feels lonely and in a desperate moment befriends the younger man who brings her shopping rounds every weekend, where it unintentionally develops into something more and she cant control it. Over time, when it develops into a full blown affair, it is no longer her feelings, but the huge secret which she is fighting to keep under wraps.

*A teenager troubled by the shame of their parents past takes their life leaving behind a mystery.

The setting that will probably work is the school, as we want our soap to have a youthful modern feel to it. However, we could also use one of our houses for the party scene, a high wall with a drop for the suicide scene, or with a bit of fake blood, and a knife, cutting the wrists. (I think this could work quite well).
We could also make an effort to find a busy street in order to get the community feel within it, and a playground scene to capture children playing football. This would portray the normal behaviour of the local children playing.

Our target audience will be from about 16- 25. We will make it appeal to that audience by portraying enough interesting storylines to keep the audience reeled in. The audience will sympathize for some characters and dislike others. We will only be making the trailer to a soap, so the obvious choice for music would be music that the characters cannot hear. ‘Hollyoaks’ uses this approach often, not just in their trailers, but in their episodes as well. It is not exactly realistic, but it gets its audience in the mood. The trailer for ‘Skins’ always uses upbeat music to convey the energetic mood of the series to the audience it is trying to real in, and this is what we want to achieve. We will leave our sense of realism basic, however we have already discussed the kinds of camera techniques that would work to heighten this. We thought that opening and shutting the cap on the lens of the camera could create the effect of eyes blinking when the raped girl is waking up. Obviously, in the trailer, we do not want to reveal too much, so cliff- hangers are the key to keeping the audience wanting more. Amongst all of the characters, the sense of gossip will be strong, and is a definite must for our soap as well as the trailer. It could be an element of why a character decided to commit suicide, what the woman having an affair fears most, and what all the youth do amongst themselves while one of them is unknowingly pregnant with an unwanted child. The time within the series will be realistic like ‘Eastenders’, with only a night passing between each episode, so that the audience feel more like they are within the action. The realism of the soap will be even more evident as we will be using real locations such as the school, the streets, and real houses.

Overall, we think this idea for a soap will be a good idea as it brings something slightly new to the world of television with the storylines fit for a film, and we feel it will be successful if it were a real media product.