The camera work of the project was, I thought, very difficult. This is because in mainstream soaps they can afford to have multiple cameras

        The camera work of the project was, I thought, very difficult. This is because in mainstream soaps they can afford to have multiple cameras and high tech editing software. Usually in this sort of scene, the directors of programs like Eastenders would have two or maybe three cameras in one room. Our scene would have worked a lot better if we had had a camera for each shot this would have meant that the entire scene could have been shot in one go rather than shot each shot separately. Shooting each one separately meant that the scene wouldn’t fit together as smoothly as the other more professional method.

        The editing for the final piece was surprisingly quite easy, mainly because in soaps they don’t use any special editing techniques. Going from scene to scene is achieved by a simple straight cut from one shot to another using no transitions of any kind.

        The main soaps from which we took our inspiration were I think Eastenders, Neighbours and Hollyoaks.

        “Eastenders” is the most serious of the three influences and thus we didn’t take too much from it because of the target audience we were going for, we took mainly the stereotypical characters from it.

        “Neighbours” is a more cheery soap from Australia, from this I got the idea for some lighthearted music; the only difference was the lack of lyrics.

        Finally, from Hollyoaks we got the idea for the main focus on the lives of young people.

        I would love to do this project again with perhaps more time and more equipment so that I could do exactly what I wanted with my footage and perhaps make an entire episode rather than just the introduction.

        After watching a couple of soaps, I feel that our soap would fit in well with the other mainstream soaps, probably no one of the top ones but I feel the its appeal could stretch to all age groups.