Ideal Audience Member Moodboard

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As part of my research and planning, I have created a small mood board to show the qualities of Mill Lane’s ideal audience member. The areas that I have covered are regionality, age, social class and ethnicity as they are the most relevant to our target audience.

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Regionality

Regionality is important as it allows the audience to understand the influences that a location can have on the characters of the soap. It also gratifies the audiences members' personal needs by allowing them to compare their lives to those of the characters'.

Because our soap is set in the countryside, our ideal audience member would live in a rural location. This means that our audience can relate to the hobbies, activties and lifestyle of the characters.

I've also decided that because our soap puts a modern spin on the traditional rural soap by including a young and inner-city character, our soap opera appeals to a wider range of audiences, including people who live in urban areas.

Age

Age is important as it allows the audience to relate directly to the characters in terms of morals, beliefs, experiences, interests and problems. It also gratifies the audiences members' personal needs by allowing them to compare their lives to those of the characters'.

Our ideal audience member would not have a certain age as our soap opera would appeal to a range of different age groups. Because the characters of Mill Lane range from sassy young females to bitter elderly residents, viewers of all ages are able to engage with the soap.


Families would be the most beneficial target audience group for our soap as the age range is likely to  be quite broad, and could include as many as 3-4 generations. The reason we chose to target families over other audiences is because of their influences on each other.


If a family watches TV together in the evenings, then they are watching the same programme together. Therefore, if one member of the family watches our soap, then the other members of the family will also watch our soap.

Social Class

Social class is also an important factor of how well the audience connects with the soap. Because our soap opera has a broad range of characters, we are able to represent a variety of social classes. Ideally, out target audience would be fall under demographic groups B and under.


We intentionally excluded demographic group A as the differences in lifestyles between the viewer and the characters would be too extreme for a connection to even be established between the two. Our ideal target audience member would work during the day and relax in the evenings. This would means that watching our soap could be associated with relaxing at home, which could result in becoming an every day routine.

Ethnicity

In the story lines of Mill Lane, we intend to introduce new characters from different ethnic backgrounds. Because modern society is so culturally diverse, including characters of different religions, cultures and skin colours would reflect the reality of the world today and create a strong sense of verisimilitude.


It is also important to us that our soap includes a range of ethnicities as it means that our range of target audience members because much more broad, and allows people from other countries in the world to be able to relate to the characters and events in the soap.

Target Audience Profile

As part of G324 project, we will be creating a TV trailer advertising a brand new soap opera. Because soaps can target various audiences, we have selected a group of people that we want our trailer to appeal to the most.

We’ve chosen to specifically target demographic groups C, D and E, which includes the unemployed, students, blue collar workers and un-skilled/semi-skilled workers. We’ve intentionally left out high social class groups, such as A and B, as we have taken into account that upper-classed citizens would not be able to engage with the characters or relate to the lifestyles in the soap. From a stereotypical point of view, it is also likely that people within demographic groups A and B would not appreciate the slang or type of drama our soap would contain.

More specifically, our ideal target audience member would either be a male or female over the age of 14. We based this selection on the broad age range of the characters within the soap. The reason we chose not to target a younger audience is because of the drama, violence and lack of morality our storylines would involve. Apart from these restrictions, we generally target a mass audience.

We also aim to attract audience members of different ethnicites and cultural backgrounds. We've chosen to do this through creating a culturally diverse soap, which includes characters with different lifestyles and beliefs coinciding with other stereotypical soap characters. This creates a sense of verisimilitude in our soap and reflects the reality of society.

One soap opera that influenced the inner working of our own soap was Eastenders. Eastenders targets a mass audience across the UK and is the most culturally diverse soap opera on TV today. The fact that Eastenders has won multiple awards, including 6 BAFTA awards, shows that there is a strong correlation between the characters and success of the soap. For this reason, we decided that incorporating characters from different ethnic backgrounds would benefit our soap through attracting a wider range of audience members.

Idea on Lighting For Our Soap

Soap Trailer Brief

About Our Soap
After mapping our thoughts and ideas for the theme and content of our soap opera, we decided as a group that we wanted to take something old and out-of-date, and turn it into something new and modern. For this reason, we chose to base our soap in a small, rural village that stretches along a road called 'Mill Lane'.

This idea was inspired by the soap opera Emmerdale, as it started as a small farm-based soap with a very small selection of characters. As it became more popular, it expanded to a village setting and gained more residents and storylines.

The difference between our soap and existing soaps like Emmerdale is that the location of the soap, and the characters and storylines of the soap are conventional opposites. In our case, the location is rural, isolated and very small. But the characters spread over several generations and the storylines are exciting, extreme and shocking. The location is the old fashioned theme, while the characters who live in the location and the dramatic relationships between them introduce a fresh twist to the traditional soap.

The Location and Lifestyle

The name of the soap is called Mill Lane, as it informs the audience of the location of the soap. Mill Lane is divided into 3 main locations: The road 'Mill Lane' itself, 'Broomfield Mill' and 'The Kings Arms' pub.

'Mill Lane' is the residential area of all the characters in the soap. It only consists of housing and some greenery. 'Broomfield Mill' is located at the end of 'Mill Lane' and is sometimes referred to as 'The Mill'. The area is mainly public footpaths, large fields and farm housing. 'The Kings Arms' pub is the hot spot of Mill Lane, and tends to be the only location that residents of 'Mill Lane' gather for social events and celebrations.

Storylines and Characters

The most exciting part of Mill Lane is the characters and how they interact with each other to create storylines. The characters range from a young, essex female to an elderly farm owner. The conflict between characters, due to age, ethnicity, beliefs and interests, means that we can cook up a huge variety of interesting and engaging storylines that will captivate our audience members, no matter who they might be.

A quick and easy way to describe what our soap opera contains is to call it a hybrid between Hollyoaks and Emmerdale.

The Trailer
The trailer for Mill Lane will introduce several storylines. The main storyline will be the introduction of a new resident called Rachel Mannings. We created this storyline as Rachel's appearance on 'Mill Lane' disturbs the predictable, peaceful lifestyle of the existing residents and characters.


The less important storyline involves a series of secrets shared between the characters Jennifer Ward, Charlie Collins and Barry Brooker. The dilemma is centred around Jennifer, as she has had an affair with both men and is now pregnant with a child. The cliff-hanger is not knowing which of the two best friends is the father of Jennifer's baby, and entices the audience to want to find out who the father is and how the characters will react when the news breaks out.

The First Episode
The purpose of our particular trailer is to advertise the storylines and events that take place in the first episode of Mill Lane. The same storylines, involving Rachel Mannings and Jennifer Ward, will take up the majority of the first episode. The rest of the episode will be focused on getting to know the personalities and lifestyles of as many characters in the soap as possible.

Soap Opera Trailer Flowchart

I've created a flow chart for the sequence of our trailer to allow us to visually organise and structure how we want our trailer to run. The characters are linked with at least one other character in the trailer, and are connected with arrows to show that there is a relationship between them.

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As a group, we've decided that making one character the focus of the trailer would be the most realistic way of linking the characters together. We've chosen Rachel Mannings, as her brassy personality and bad attitude make it easy for the characters of Mill Lane to share a hatred for her.

Rachel's entrance to the soap is a perfect example of Todorov's narrative theory of equilibrium. In the trailer, the residents of Mill Lane all have their problems and little dramas, but are generally peaceful and live in a state of equilibrium. This is portrayed through the natural and high key lighting associated with the existing residents before they are aware of Rachel's move to 'Mill Lane'.

Rachel Mannings' entrance to the area is the disturbance of the equilibrium, and already begins to create conflict between the characters upon arriving at 'Mill Lane'.This conflict between the local residents and Rachel is the recognition of the disturbance, and the locals are able to realise that her moving to 'Mill Lane' will disturb the tranquillity of the countryside and will affect their happiness and lifestyle.