Using other soap opera trailers/scenes such as Eastenders and other, our group decided to use a car crash as the main dramatic narrative point but we couldn't film a car crashing so we decided to use a shot of someone in the car as if they were dead or unresponsive like this scene/preview in Eastenders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRV9X0wz2Kg
The use of a car in my trailer is affective as the auidence's attention is grabbed due to hidden causes or who did it although we also decided to show someone messing with the car by filming someone underneath it without showing the face it created mystery and storyline that audiences want to follow everynight until they know who did it and why. We also shot a low shot of two people exchanging money just be showing the hands and the money, this again created a sense of tension because the audience wants to know if the money has anything to do with the car crash.
We also wanted to add emotion and drama by having the teenage/young adult in the car to have a pregnant girlfriend who finds out by a phone call but I decided to leave the phone call out, to create more tension, so by just showing the phone ring but you can't see the number, the auidence question how it links to the car crash such as if someone is ringing up to tell her the bad news or if they are going to threaten the girl aswell. Doing this adds even more to the conventions of a soap opera where they make a story last over 3-6 episodes with cliffhangers or cutting the story at the end so the auidence will have to watch the next one to find out what happens next.
Then we took two other storylines/narratives that have somewhat similar themes such as someone walking into someone cheating or finding out. We decided to do something like this from eastenders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f949uafKpCc, we thought the way this was done would be too time consuming so we decided to have the girlfriend and the person she is having an affair with walk to the door and hug while at the same time her boyfriend walks into the house only to find them, we thought it would be to typical to have a boyfriend cheating on his girlfriend so we swapped it around to not follow the stereotypical narrative. This was really affective as we used it to end the trailer as another storyline like a cliffhanger to the trailer, where the auidence is once again caught by tension to find out what happens next and how these characters will react.
The main difference with my trailer and existing soap operas that deal with the issues is that my trailer has non diegtic music playing underneath the trailer, this was used to give it more of a teenager/young adult auidence feel to it as with Eastenders where the trailers have little or no music to make the soap serious and gritty for the impact of getting attention from parents/older people. The song chosen for my soap opera trailer for 'The Grove' was to add emphasis to the narratives of love/broken hearts which was affective as most of the narratives followed this idea. Using Lacan's theory of mirroring is affective as the music shows and represents the main characters of the storyline not as a copy device but as if the trailer copies the general stereotype of how people dress and lets them relate to the program.
Overall using similar or different conventions from different trailers/scenes made my trailer unquie in its approach to grasp and relate to the target audience its created for.
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