Past Students Soap Opera Trailer 2

Mise-en-scene

A range of locations are shown - domestic interior environments, such as inside a home, a school and a drugs store. Exterior settings used include a park and a street. This range of settings brings about verisimilitude and makes it more conventionally realistic to that of real people's lives.

Costumes involved are also conventional but simple - hoodies, coats and headphones are all items that are stereotypically linked to teenagers, making the representations conventional.

Props are additionally used, such as a pregnancy test, mobile phone and drugs. This integrates the characters into the settings and makes them more believable and realistic for the audience. These props are also used to interlink storylines, such as with texting and the pregnancy storyline.

Titles

Throughout the clips, words are used - such as 'escape', 'release' and 'mistakes' - connoting with drama and emotion to splice up the clips and make the audience associate the shots with the words. They are done in a way that looks professional with black backgrounds and white, glowing text to make the titles stand out. Information on when the soap is aired and the channel logo (E4) is shown too, to give information to the audience.

Sound

In this trailer, both diegetic and non-diegetic sound are used, including music and dialogue. Fast paced, non-diegetic techno or dubstep-like music is used throughout the trailer, which is music often associated with teenagers. During a point where it gets fast paced (with the characters who have drugs) the music lowers in volume to hear the characters rummaging around in the house and one of the characters yells, "Crap, Daniel!" to then hear the non-diegetic sound of police sirens. This use of diegetic dialogue highlights the drama of the soap and interests the audience more. Afterwards, the music starts back up again.

An improvement for sound could be that a voice-over over the titles at the end would be good, to pull the audience in more and help them remember when the soap airs. A voice-over would also be stereotypical and conventional to that of general E4 and soap opera trailers.

Editing

Editing within this trailer is fairly simple (aside from the titles) in that the pacing is fairly regular and not too slow or fast. The cuts in the trailer do speed up, however, when the characters are rummaging through the house. This heightens the drama and makes the audience more interested.

Camera Angles

A good variation of camera angles are used throughout this trailer, with shots such as over-the-shoulder shots, mid shots, two-shots, tilts and even a 360 degree turn. The variation of shots keeps the audience interested and the shots are all a suitable length. The 360 degree turn isn't particularly conventional to soaps but it does give the trailer a different style and makes it unique to what is usually seen, enhancing the drama and danger of drug dealing. Framing overall is good in that you can clearly see the characters and their actions, as well as the interior or exterior settings. However, with one shot it could be seen as questionable as the characters on the street walk closely towards the camera, which is framed somewhat strangely and doesn't seem to execute in the way I think they were trying to achieve.


Overall, I think that this trailer is really good in all aspects of mise-en-scene, titles, sound, editing and camera angles and it uses conventional and challenging aspects of each. I do have a few criticisms with that the range of characters could be better in terms of age range, but it does seem like this soap would focus mostly on the lives of teenagers and young adults rather than people of all ages.