The ideology in Hollyoaks is that student live and being young is great but has its up’s and down’s. The good things about being a student is being able to do what ever you want when you want, and having responsibility to do what you want, such as drinking but the hard parts of being a student are exams and revising, also putting up with people you don’t like and bullies.
The institution is Channel 4, Mersey television. The narrative to Hollyoaks is linear with a break in the middle. Some language is slang that young people will understand such as “fit” for someone who they think is attractive; this language will appeal to young people so they can understand the programme better and be more involved.
Hollyoaks always starts off with the theme tune so we can recognise that it is about to start and finish, also at the beginning of each episode it starts with them waking up and music playing instead of talking, this is different to other soaps so makes it more personal to the programme and viewers.
British people will relate to Hollyoaks much more than American TV programmes such as the O.C as it has the British cultural context and viewers like to see their own country portrayed in a TV programme.
Hollyoaks is both character and story led as the characters are put in different situations and we get involved in their life and can relate to what is happening in their life, but it is also story led as we become interested in the story and want to find out more once the episode has ended we can’t wait to find out what happens tomorrow.
The narrative in Hollyoaks in linear and there is a break in between. The characters are delineated by us (the audience) getting a good or bad view of them. The characters do this by talking behind each others backs about people, here we get a bad view, but they may also do something nice for one another or a character may safe the day by helping out their fellow neighbours. When something bad happens to the characters we can usually identify with them and feel sorry for them as we, at one time, would have been in their situation. The major themes of Hollyoaks are student life, romance and family life, all off the things that students can relate to.
The major generic conventions are that university students live with friends in a place at university, students like to party almost every night and get drunk and also the pub relates to typical British culture.
The camera work in Hollyoaks gives us the feeling that there is only one camera and that we are watching events as they happen. We can observe from a particular point of view rather than seeing events from different angles. In Hollyoaks there are a lot of over the shoulder shots, this allows us to concentrate on the facial response of one character which we can see, it can also mean that we are identifying with the character whose back we see, as they too would be watching the characters reaction. We normally see characters at the same level; this puts us on a similarity with them. The angle of which the camera is placed can affect our emotional response to characters.
