Common room and sofa
We decided to film some scenes in our common room because as one of the main settings in our soap opera is a school, a common room would be an obvious meeting point for our characters. When doing our research we also discovered that many soap operas have a meeting point for example in Eastenders, “The Vic” is where everybody always seems to be and in Hollyoaks, characters are always in the “SU bar”
In our common room we have a brown leather sofa which we thought we would take advantage of, so we used this as a filming opportunity and filmed the scene between the characters Summer and Lukas. We filmed during school hours because we wanted to maintain the busy school atmosphere; however this got quite difficult at times because we had many inconsiderate people who would mess up our filming by walking past or shouting out people’s names.
Using the teachers Office
When originally filming this scene, we filmed one of our teachers in her office saying the lines “We’ve got a new girl starting today.” However when we were editing on the Mac, we played around with the sounds and by accident I ended up deleting this scene. However the sound remained and it was at the very beginning when we first see the character of Summer; as a group we decided that although this was accidental we actually preferred it this way so we kept it like that. However we did use the office as we filmed Amanda walking past saying her line, with our teacher sitting in the office. This helped to create a school atmosphere and we were able to introduce two new characters in a short amount of time.
Corridor
There is a corridor directly outside the teacher’s office which is also adjacent to the common room. We used this corridor in two of our scenes however in one of them we had to actually change the setting. This was because when we were filming we kept making too much noise so our head of year came out of her office to shout at us and told us to move! This can be seen in our outtakes. The corridor is also right outside the toilets in which we filmed the scene between the characters David and Otis, where they have a short conversation.
