Evaluation - question 1

Evaluation

“In what ways does your media product use, develop and challenge forms and conventions on real media products?”

Use of narrative

To help us to develop our soap opera, ‘The Vale’, we have used and developed many different conventions which are displayed in real soap operas seen today on television.

The following images are stills from ‘The Vale’ which outline the use of the story lines, whilst showing cross plots and multi stranding.

  

Here we can see one of the main characters ‘Taz’ in four different story lines. Cross plots and multi stranding are used as we see the character ‘Taz’ linked to several different story lines. From these chosen stills you can also see that we have more than one story line being displayed at one time which is conventional for real TV soap operas.

We have used stock characters as well as main characters in order to help us build story lines.

Here is a still of Laurens mum entering the frame. We only have a short clip of her and don’t show her identity as she is only used to build help create a story line. This is done in soap operas to create a realistic feel to the soap opera.

 Gritty realism is used greatly in soap opera where heart hitting story lines are addressed building the views emotions with a character.

  

Here we see gritty realism with two heart hitting story lines and the automatic stereotypes. These storylines are created via with use of location, props and costumes.

The realism is created by the dealing of dugs in an urban grimy like area whilst wearing ‘chav’ like clothing of jogging bottoms, hooded tops and trainers. This also relates to propps theory were he argues that the characters that appear in narratives can be divided into just eight character types.

It is also conventional for soap operas to have cliff hangers. This is done to create suspense leaving the viewer wanting to see what happens next but having to wait until then next episode for all to be revealed.

Here we have created a cliff hanger as Lauren leaves the house to run away. This was created by not showing where she was going or who she was running away with. We did this so that the view would want to watch the follow up to the story line to find out what happens.

 Mise-en-scene

These are stills of the locations in which we used for ‘The Vale’.

   

We chose these locations as people likely to watch our soap opera would be able to relate to them where as if we had a manor house and country parks it would be in realistic.

Here are stills of the props we used throughout our teaser trailer.