My First Lesson

My first lesson in class involved a group activity where we were told to list as many things a possible which were associated with the two superpowers U.S.A and Russia.

USA	Russia
Capitalism	Communism
Cold War	Cold War
Nuclear Weapons	Nuclear Weapons
Hollywood	Snow
NBA/NFL/MLB/NHL	AK-47
Obama	KGB
Fat people	Moscow
Burgers	Vodka
Celebrities	Wolfs
Declaration of Independence	Accents

The majority of the things featured within the table are typical stereotypes associated with the two countries. However our teacher used this activity as a way of introducing two key elements/words which will benefit us in the production of our soap, this includes both iconography and representation.

Here is a list of soap opera conventions:

• Cliff hangers
• Working class
• Parallel storylines
• Multiple storylines
• Accents
• Locations
• Rural/urban
• Credits
• Serial
• Everyday/Weekly
• Characters
• Stereotypes
• Dramatic
• Opera
• Melodramatic
• Realism
• Sensationalised
• Contradictory
• Peak viewing time
• Audience
• Gossip
• Magazine
• Form of other media
• Form of other media
• Spoilers and teasers
• Controversy
• Introducing characters
• Strong female characters
• Sexuality

Then we were informed of four different types of representation which include social class, age, gender and ethnicity.Therefore in order for our soap to be successfull we needed to make these representation as accurate as possible.