As part of planning our soap storylines and plots, we thought it would be best to create a mind map and mood board that clearly shows the types of character relationships and storylines our soap opera will contain, and how our specific characters link together. When creating our storyboards and script, we found looking back at this piece of work useful for remembering how our characters interact with one another, and realised how important it is to keep consistency in storylines during the planning stage.
(Click to enlarge)
The majority of characters get along, but the characters linked with arrows have special relationships. The smiley face between two people represents a strong friendship, the love heart shows that there is a relationship or affair between the selected characters, and the angry face with exclamation points means that there is hatred between the linked characters.
The mood board is a very basic presentation that shows our initial ideas on dramatic events, location and character relationships. Our thoughts were focused on setting our soap in a domestic location to follow generic conventions, and having a large variety in relationship types (eg. lovers, enemies, best friends, family, etc.) and dramatic storylines (eg. death, marriage, pregnancy, homosexuality, etc.).
Devon Dalton
