All Change!

After long discussions on whether the teenage pregnancy storyline will be effective we have changed our minds completley. Upon remembering the recent Eastender's storyline featuring Heather Trott, who was pregnant with a selection of possible fathers and the positive reaction it got we thought that it may be more effective for us to convey.

The new idea is that the advert is now going to focus of me being pregnant and there is two possible fathers. I am coming back to the location of the soap to tell them which one is the dad! This new idea is very exciting and leaves us with a much larger scope for character development.

Copyright Letter

Above is the letter that we sent to universal records requesting the use of the Amy Winehouse single "You know I'm no good". We are going to use this song in the background of our remake video, just as in the original Eastenders clip. It is needed to ask their permission to use the song, as it is copyrighted and would therefore be illegal to use otherwise.

Main Advert Ideas

Since the teenage pregnancy idea Zara and I have been trying to focus our attention on whether this will be possible to convey. We thought the advert should perhaps revolve around me trying to tell my parents the truth or trying to conceal it from other characters in the soap. This would mean featuring either Zara or my parents in the video, which will take a lot of convincing! I volunteered to be in the video for the main part and Zara and I film between us when possible.

In the large part soap opera adverts are a relatively idea. All the adverts we could find on the Internet have been from the past 5 years. We therefore have no advert of Sarah-Lou's storyline to draw inspiration from.

The storyline was very controversial however and gained a lot of audience attention, a shocking storyline like this may gain us a lot of audience interest.

Diagram and Further Discussions

The first step before creating our advert is to decide what the main storyline that we are going to follow is going to be. To do this we created a diagram naming all the possible storylines that could realistically be followed. Zara and I both watch a lot of Soaps ourselves so the process was not that hard, we found that there was a limited number of storylines that are actually carried out, the same ideas are just reacted through different characters, we wrote down when this is the case on our diagram also.

(Click for a clearer image)


We had a discussion and both agreed that as media consumers ourselves we both enjoyed storylines involving romantic involvement, affairs and general dramatic irony. This narrowed our originally wide selection down!

After further talks about specific soap storylines we had watched ourselves we both remembered the success of the Coronation Street stryline featuring Sarah-Louise Platt became pregnant and the age of 13. Being teenagers ourselves we already had the main cast member and so our idea was born!

Remake Advert

Upon discovering that the exam board is allowing copyright (with permission) within our coursework we have decided to remake an existing soap advert for our preliminary task instead of creating one completely on our own. This way we will understand conventions of existing adverts, that will help with our actually final coursework piece, whilst also learning how to deal with the camera equipment. After searching on you tube we have found the following advert that we feel would help us to remake.

Remake Advert - Eastenders




We have decided to use this clip as the main role in the advert is a woman and we are planning to use a woman in the main role in our own ad. I also like the close up shots, and focus angles that will be helpful to practise with. There is simple editing between the shots of the character "Sam" and clips of her family, that we can again practise using our new editing software with. Soap story lines are often dramatic, as this one is featuring the return of a sexually provocative character and therefore we have decided to include a controversial storyline. Although not compulsory we both thought it would be helpful for our filming skills to practise! I'll keep you updated with our progress!