Film & Television

Activities

Lucy Gough

Issues for Discussion

• Is there such a thing as a typical teenager?
• Do soaps like Hollyoaks concentrate too much on the problems of today’s teenagers?
• What is meant by having a responsibility to the teenage audience? Do soap writers have a moral responsibility for the welfare of their audience? If so, would this mean encouraging certain forms of behaviour while discouraging others?
• How realistic should soap opera be?
• What are the advantages or disadvantages of team writing? Would this approach weaken the individuality of plot and character?

Activities

• Watch an episode of a soap. Discuss how the hook is prepared. You could stop before the end of the episode and discuss or write a suitable hook. In groups, discuss how the episode might continue, having first considered the number of distinct stories in the episode.
• Write Sue’s diary entry for her wedding day. What do you think are the issues that are important to young people today? Pick one and prepare for a class discussion. Give the class situations on which to write a short scene ending with a hook. Exchange scripts. Write the scene following the cliff-hanger.

Ed Thomas

Issues for Discussion

• To what extent does American culture influence Welsh life?
• What, if anything, could constitute a Welsh identity, now and in the future?
• Search the Internet for past and present images of Wales.
• ‘Life imagined is better than a life reproduced.’ Do we need heroes and heroines? Are pop stars and film stars today’s heroes?

Activities

• Watch the extracts from Hollyoaks and House of America. Consider how film and television stories differ in presentation. Use the following headings: ‘pace’; ‘relationships between characters’; ‘camera use’; ‘language’. Discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of film and television media.
• Individually or in groups, write a script based on the story of the boy who killed his mother.
• Write a report for the local newspaper about an accidental shooting.
• Prepare your own family story to tell your group. Write the story from the different viewpoints of two of the characters.
• In pairs, discuss Ed Thomas’s explanation of how he writes films (‘words make sentences, sentences make ideas, ideas make films’). Make a list of the questions you would like to ask him about his film and film-making.
• Using the programme and the Links section of these notes, write a publicity leaflet for House of America.
• Make a recording of an older relative telling a family story and present it to the class.