Soap Planning: Coursework Characters and Audience

Our media group has spent the past week planning for our soap coursework trailer based on what we've been covering in lessons, such as characters, settings and themes.
From the beginning, we've known that we'd want to film a more dramatic soap that will be driven on character development, and to show this we came up with the concept of stories having multiple angles, this would then emerge as our show's tagline "each story has two sides".
In late September, Ed came up with the idea of having a character walking through a street observing characters, in different lights - with them being a good citizen at one moment, and then suddenly shifting into a darker personality. Josh, then came up with the tagline "each story has two sides" and from that I wrote up an early draft of a screenplay, which envolves the character walking through the street making non diegetic observations and commentaries on life in the town the soap would be set in, eventually walking to look the camera head on, and as he finishes his trail of thought, a gunshot would echo, at which point the tagline would come in. However, we decided that this would be too dark for a soap, and also too linear from a character viewpoint, focusing the trailer mainly on one individual rather than the community. So this initial screenplay was scrapped.

When we officially began planning, we were a step ahead, having already decided the script's content, and so we went about planning the nature of the show, deciding that the theme of the soap would apply more to a young demographic, like Hollyoaks' demographic. Therefore we decided that everything involved would need to be contemporary. From this, Josh was able to find a suitable track to play during the trailer, which was from the contemporary genre fo dubstep, thus appealing to the youth demographic.

We also had to plan the characters that would be involved. We all pitched in various ideas for the characters, basing our ideas on stock characters that are common in each soap, ranging across all ages and social classes in order to reflect realism of living in a commune. Additionally, we would need to have multiple types of people so audience members would be able to relate to a character in the show, the characters we came up with varied accordingly, by class, age, gender, ethnicity and even social backgrounds.

Various typical characters in a soap were quick, and easy to suggest, with my suggestions of rebellious teens, business people, and a dog to reflect realistic settings. Other characters shown were also quick to decide due to our planning prior, and also having done considerable research on characters commonly apperaing on many soaps, thus allowing us to quickly and efficiently plan out our soap characters.
Once we had planned the characters, it was then time to plan possible plots.