Purpose and conventions of a trailer

The main purpose of any trailer is to entice the viewer to watch the full media, and this is no different with a soap opera trailer.  It will be aimed at the target audience of the soap, which is generally a broad range; from teenagers to the elderly, and so has to cleverly capture the interest of these people.  In order to do this, it will usually tease at the plot line and characters involved, without giving away any major facts or outcomes.  It is common for soap trailers to end on a cliffhanger, which helps to draw the audience in as they want to discover what happens.

Conventions of soap opera trailers differ from those found in full soap opera episodes.  We will need to consider the following conventions in order to create our own realistic soap opera trailer:

Sound
A vast difference is how sound is used in the two.  Within soap operas (apart from Hollyoaks), there is never any non-diegetic sound as the soap is made to be as realistic a verisimilitude representation of everyday life as possible.  In a soap opera trailer however, there is use of non-diegetic sound and is rarely much diegetic sound involved.  However, this does depend on the audience the trailer is targeting.  For new audiences, to give them an insight into the storylines and characters, the trailer may consist of a combination of clips from a soap episode itself, where there would obviously be diegetic sound involved.  Other soap opera trailers consist completely of new scenes filmed especially for the trailer.  These don't often have diegetic dialogue and have a song overlaying the action.  These trailers are for pre-existent viewers, who already know about the characters and plots, to capture their attention using the Uses and Gratifications theory;  they are interested and want to watch the episode to find out more.

Titling
Unlike soap opera episodes, the titles in soap trailers come at the end.  These can be in a visual or narrated format, or both.  The name of the soap, the channel it is shown on and when it is shown is always included to ensure it is clear to the audience where they can see the soap, as you can see below:

 

To entice and entrail a younger audience, as you can see from this last image, the use of the social networking site, Twitter's, hashtag has been incorporated into the title screen.  This is an effective way of reaching out to the youth of today's society; where most people have access to social networking sites at all times through their handheld electrical appliances such as mobile phones and iPods.

Camera Angles

Lots of the time in soap opera trailers, more close-up shots and mid shots are used, than in the soap opera episode, as a way to introduce the audience to the characters.  These shots help to convey the emotion within the characters faces and how they interact with the other characters so the audience can create assumptions, assess and determine the characters' personalities and relationships.  In effect, this gives them a taster of what the whole episode is to be like - so the more interesting and captivating it is, the better.  These closer shots are used more so in the trailers than in the full episodes; where the action is followed with long shots.

Narrative
Similarly to soap opera episodes, the trailers are usually edited continuously in order for easy viewing - if the trailer was too confusing, the audience may not want to watch the whole episode, although there does need to be a level of excitement and mystery to add the interest needed in order to claim this new audience.  More often than not, Propps' hero/villain/helper theory is seen in soap opera trailers to increase interest and to give the audience a sense of knowing and an insight into who the characters are. 

Over many half an hour soap opera episodes, Todorov's theory of equilibrium is used where the state of equilibrium is disrupted and recognised before being, usually, overcome once again to reveal equilibrium.  However, this happens over a long period of time throughout various episodes.  In a soap opera trailer everything happens a lot more fast-paced.  Usually, the state of equilibrium is shown as well as the disruption of the equilibrium, which builds to a dramatic climax at the end of the trailer.  This cliffhanger cleverly encourages the viewer to watch the full episode.