Linking to exam works

For the exam based aspect of this course we are studying collective identity and social realism on television and film. Our chosen topic is the Welsh so for that we are linking into this aspect by looking into a new reality Tv program called The Valleys which is essentially a Welsh version of Geordie Shore and The Only Way is Essex. However The Valleys is very derogative of the Welsh though some of its scenes are filmed well.

The Valleys Logo

The Valleys poster

Filmed Auditions

The above film is footage of some of our auditions that we held in order to decide who we wanted to act in our trailer, it starts off initially with an overview of what we are doing. Below is a list of all people involved (not all auditions included in video)

Documentarians
Stevie Anthony
Hannah Parker     (All Documentarians featured in footage above)
Stephen Pearce


Girls:
Zoe Smith
Lauren Barber
Megan Mctravers
Nia Jones
Eve Thomas
Sophie Bees
Paige Rees
Hannah Parker

Boys:
Jevan Cannon
Zak Rossaye
Brandon Frowen
Ben Hunter
Karl Deacy
Aaron Tuck

Ideas and Storylines

Our principle idea that we are going to work with for our teen soap is a party of teenagers where they get drunk and wander around the site doing things in a montage of shots of specific characters doing things to suggest story lines that would feature in the soap.

We decided to go for 3 main ideas for central storylines in our soap, we wanted to go for storylines that were good but weren't so overly used that they are regarded as cliches. (e.g. teenage pregnancy)
we came up with....

on a different character from various real soaps and series, or by taking an element of a character that we like and applying it to one of our ow characters. We are basing Paige on the character Effy from E4's Skins, she is



This is Zak who shall be playing one of the gay characters

• A love triangle (admittedly a common story in soaps but we made ours involve homosexuality so that it would be different to all the others that like to feature it.) The idea we have is to have 2 men who are openly gay and proud, these both go a party but the next morning 1 wakes up with a girl in bed with him which is inevitably going to cause ructions. We will be having our actors Zak, Brandon and Paige to star in our trailer, we are basing each charactera troubled character in the series who is idolised and has some effective and hitting story lines. We shall be basing Zak on two different characters both from Skins. The character of Tony from series one, he is the  'ring leader' of his group of friends he is cool but has an subtle darker side that we can see bubbling. We shall also base him on Freddie from series two of Skins, again he is a cool character but is a very likeable character.

This is Freddie, one of the inspirations for Zak

Effy from Skins

This is Tony he is the other inspirational character for Zak

Karl, this is who shall play our drug dealer character 

• A drug dealer (played by Karl) (seen before but not often) we have decided Karl is the 'leader' of his group of friends and is the leader/head of the party, we have decided to take inspiration and traits of his character are derived from the character Chris from series 1 and 2 of Skins, he is what slang users would refer to as a 'druggie' (drug user/ dealer) yet we decided that he should actually be a very nice person despite his disposition towards dangerous and illegal substances. His attitude for life that he often tells the other characters in Skins is 'F*** It'. We are also basing Karl on Alo from series 5 and 6 of Skins. He is the generic loud and funny type however like the rest of the characters has underlying problems that will evidently arise in the soap. He brings the light humour to the dark soap we are aiming to create. We want to give Karl some one liners to shout in the trailer as we think this will fit well with the trailer and his character. One direct line that we will use that Alo says is "we are the children of the revolution'' we think this will link with our theme of our soap.

Chris from Skins- characteristics directly applied to Karl 

Alo- Another inspiration for our drug dealing Karl

• An Aids/HIV transmission between 2 characters (not a common story, so unique yet also has the potential to be a powerful storyline if it was done correctly.) We are having our character played by Ben, after having 'relations' with Hannah  (our other character) we are going to have Ben receiving a phone call, the only thing the audience hear is "the results were positive" and then we see Ben leaving to find Hannah to 'break the news.'  This creates and enigma code which shall interest the audience.

Music For film

For our trailer we need music that is copyright free, this only gives us a few basic and rather bland options of what type of music we can use, however Stevie asked a band called Kids in Glass Houses on Twitter if we could use a song or 2 for our project, they very kindly agreed and here is the proof. It as a screenshot of Stevie's tweet to Andrew Shay, the bassist for Kids in Glass Houses. Below is one of the songs we can now use.