Treatment (Planning)

For our soap trailer, we wanted to get three or more stories across to our target audience. We decided that we wanted three different stories within our trailer, because we thought that our target audience would be able to relate to these stories with their own life's in some particular way. These three stories are all about people having problems/issues within their lives, which may relate to people in the real world, the issues that our soap is set around are drug, financial and family issues. As a group we thought that these were some of the stronger problems that our target audience may be able to relate to, as these particular issues are very common. We thought that these issues would be suitable because our target audience may be able to get an understanding of the problems drugs and financial issues can cause, and get a better understanding of how the characters actually feel about the problems they are facing.

For the location of our soap trailer, we decided that we were going to use our local town, which is St Neots (Image on the right). We thought that this would be a suitable for our soap trailer as well as our target audience because all soap operas have a set location, for example the soap Eastenders is set around a square (market). All of our locations that we used for our soap trailer were are located around the town. Setting our soap around the St Neots Town was more beneficial as, myself and the rest of the team already live around the area, so because of this, once we had our stories, locations for each of the stories were very easy to find. For example the Pub (Pig and Falcon and the betting shop (Ladbrokes) are located within the St Neots town.

Location Photos (Group Planning)

During the time of planning stories for our soap trailer, one of my roles was to find suitable locations for these particular stories. At this point, we were unsure about the about the sort of stories that we wanted within our trailer as we did not want the stories that you would normally find within soaps, however we had stories prepared just in case we could not think of any stories that would be suitable for our target audience (16-24).

 This is the first  location photo that we took, which is a picture of an alley located in St Neots, Cambridgeshire. One of the stories that we had planned was a teenager with a drug issue problem. We thought that this would be an ideal location in which we could involve a drug deal situation as its a quiet/dark area, which would relate to this sort of situation. We thought that this particular location would be suitable and teenagers would be able to relate to environments such as this location.

The next image is a picture of a pub that we were planning on using throughout our soap trailer. The reason why we were going to use this location was because we needed to set a communal area, which would be the location of were characters would meet. Looking at the four main soap operas, Hollyoaks, Eastenders, Emmerdale and Coronation Street we noticed that the main communal area in each of the soap was the pubs. Therefore, because of this we decided that we would chose the Pig and Falcon as our main location. In the end we did not use this location as we had enough footage that could be edited.

The image belongs to one of the characters that played a part in our soap trailer. The reason why we used this location is because gives the audience a bit of an understanding of were the soap opera is going to bet set, for example is it going to be set it a rough area, middle class etc. Another reason why we used this location is because, right next to the location was a pathway were two of the characters linked together, as our main plan was to introduce some of the characters as soon as the trailer started.


 This image was another location that was used within our soap trailer. The story that we had behind this location, was a male character struggling with financial issues. When we film, we want the audience to get the idea of the man struggling with money, as he walks out of the betting shop, however loses on his bet, and throws it to the ground. We thought that this could an interested story to include in our soap trailer as people within our target audience may have issues with betting and gambling. 

This location was also going to be involved with one of the stories within our soap trailer. We got the idea of using a family house to be involved with our trailer, because within everyone of the main soaps that is on TV, usually has a location were it set in someones house. For this particular story, we were going to express the issues that families have in every day live.