Thursday 9 October 2008

Emotional Realism

Tv Dramas use emotional realism to connect feelings from the soap to the viewer by using relationships, death, accidents and surprises. They make the character show the same emotions as the viewers have to make the drama more realistic.








The audience can identify with the psychology and share feelings with the character. Its also important that the characters do not ' act out of character ' as this undermines the programmes realism.

Surface Realism

Surface realism is how realistic the characters, locations and props come across to the audience. Its what the characters wear and how realistic it would be for their stereotype. For example a character living in a council house would not own a Mercedes but instead it would seem more realistic to have an old Ford.


Surface Realism is also about the area or location. The setting and buildings would have to be appropriate and real to the area the characters live in. If they were to live in Manchester then the buildings and the way of living would have to appear different to somewhere like Brighton if it is going to be taken realistically by the audience.

emotional realism

Emotional realism is where one can empathise with the characters, and can relate to their predicaments. This emotional connection means the audience identifty with the characters better and share the feelings of the characters.


This clip is from Hollyoaks, and shows emotional realism from many different points of view. The audience can therefore feel empathy to each different character, and therefore react to their feelings. This episode makes people think about the situation and helps to help get the audience involved and makes them feel upset and creates a feeling of understanding because nearly everyone has been through a friend or family membver passing away this helps them relate to the situation.

Technical and symbolic codes.

Technical and symbolic codes:
Most TV soaps use realistic styles of filming. This means that the editing applied makes the cutting between shots and scenes unnoticable. This can change the audiences emotions as they empathise towards the characters emotions.




As you can see, this is shown in this clip. Also, you can see that there a certain techniques that the makers use, such as camer angles, to allow the audience see the whole mise-en-scene. The camera angles used are mainly medium long shots and P.O.V shots.

Techincal and symbolic codes

This refers to way the program is filmed and how it involes audience by keeping Continuity of camera shots. Also Continuity editing is used which is the predominant style of editing in narrative cinema and television. The purpose of continuity editing is to smooth over the inherent discontinuity of the editing process and to establish a logical coherence between shots. This therfore makes the scene seem realistic and ultimately believable.

below is an examlp of this



As you can see the shot changes are quick a snapy during conversation.While the shot changes when eople are moving are a lot smoother.

below is a example of a film which uses Technical and symbolic codes that wouldnt work in a soap like a hand held camera.


Plausible Plots

Plausible plots within TV soaps helps the viewer to relate to the soap and what is going on. They do this by using everyday subjects and events within scripts and storylines in order to make it more believable.

However when a plane crashed down in Emmerdale the viewings for the show went considerably down this is believed to be because it was not plausable and so viewers could not relate to it because it was to unbelievable. It has been found that TV viewers prefer to watch soaps that deal with things such as teen pregnany, drug taking, miscariges and death of favorite characters such as when Max died in Hollyoaks.

Have a look at the clips below and they should demonstrate some of these things and help to confirm your understanding of plausible plots in soap.











This storyline in Eastenders was to unbelievable as it is very unlikly that someone would be brought up thinking their mum was their sister so not many people would be able to relate to it and so the viewings may have gone down.





When Todd came out as being gay many people could relate to his and so the viewings would probably have gone up as the storyline was plausible. As it is something that we often see in everyday life.





This was also a plausible storyline as most people can relate to loosing someone they love within there life and as it was also the loss of a popular and well known character more people would have wanted to watch this episode than many of the others.

Emotional Realism

Little bit about your aspect of realism - what did you look at.........................