An Exciting New TV Drama Project!
LATEST NEWS:We are now in the second year of this project. The soap opera has been created from the characters and storylines developed by the young people we have been working with and the trailer has been filmed with a professional cast and crew, directed by Bruce Webb (BBC, Hollyoaks, Whatever Pictures). Filming took place on the 1st and 2nd of June 2009 at three locations and we had a screening at Shortwave Cinema in London on the 17th June 2009.
RIVERSCROSS
A 'Supersoap' cross-curricular Drama Project
A brand new soap opera, created by young people at Snowsfields Adolescent Psychiatric Unit, Guy’s Hospital
RIVERSCROSS is our latest project at the Snowsfields Adolescent Psychiatric Unit. It is funded by Guy's and St.Thomas' Charity and run by Spanner in the Works, complementing the drama workshops we have been running there for the past ten years.
With the students we are creating a brand new soap opera. It is a drama-based project that results in a piece of filmed work each year, using professional actors and filmed by a professional soap director and other TV professionals.
The fictional basis for the idea is an imaginary international railway terminus called RIVERSCROSS INTERNATIONAL. The soap opera form means that we can create a whole range of storylines, some short and some long, some comic, and some more serious.
The Station
Workshops run on a twice weekly basis. In the first stage we created a 'precinct', the world where the action takes place, then a 'bible' or ‘Series Information Document’ of the characters and history of the Riverscross area.
With a professional musician we created theme tunes, and with a graphic designer the logos and all the other elements needed to create a genuine soap opera. All the work originates from the students, with support from professional writers, actors, musicians, artists, directors, producers etc. Our role is to help stimulate ideas, then to refine and develop the ideas into storylines and scripts. Because genuine soaps use many writers and creators of all sorts we too have been drawing on a range of skills and curricular and extra-curricular subjects to create our soap.
The results of the work have now been made into a trailer and professionally filmed and acted (unfortunately due to the nature of the unit the young people themselves cannot be photographed). By using professionals in this way it has given the work an enhanced status and the young people the self-esteem of seeing the work done in a polished and professional way. The young people have been able to help right up to and beyond the filming.
The screening at Shortwave Cinema was a great success, with an invited audience of the young people who had created it and their families, health professionals and professionals form the TV and film industry.
This has completed all three phases of the first year of this three year project and we are now moving on to the second round of the project RIVERSCROSS II.
Year I in Detail (2008 – 2009):
Phase I (Autumn 2008)
CREATING THE PRECINCT
The ‘Precinct’ is where the story is set, the ‘world of the story’. Think Albert Square (EastEnders), Holby City Hospital (Holby and Casualty), The Mill (Doctors), Sunhill (The Bill), Coronation Street (Coronation Street).
We have created a 'Series Information Document' or SID (sometimes referred to as 'the bible' on a TV continuing drama series); With Russ Hodgson the students have created the logo (above) for the series and the station; also with Russ they have created a 'precinct' map of the station and the surrounding area; with Ed Thomas they created a theme tune for the series; with actors from the Union Theatre they developed characters they had created and with Tony Coult and Darren Rapier they have built and expanded the world of the drama series and brought all these elements together to form the SID and prepare for Phase Two.
Riverscross is a blank canvas, a socio-geographical blank Ordnance Surveyor’s page. It is up to us to fill in the detail. In this phase we created the world of the story, the buildings and streets, the socio-economic environment and the history of the area. Questions we addressed and subjects we covered were:
Geography – where is it? Why was the station built here? What are the other geographical and commercial landmarks? Transport systems.
History – When was the area first developed? Historical figures from the area. The arrival of the railway. Real places (Coin Street Riots etc.) that we can assimilate into our world.
Architecture – What buildings are. What they are used for now. Have they been altered/ rebuilt. Why? (War damage etc.) Photographs, sketches and drawings of the buildings and streets.
Demographic – what sort of people live and/or work in these places. Why have these people chosen to live/ work here? Mock censuses for this and previous years. Socio-economic breakdown of the area.
Art – Creating the map. Creating posters and designs. Character portraits.
Marketing – How and what is marketed. Marketing the soap itself.
PHSE – Communities and how they live together/ interact/ segregate.
Music – Creating a theme tune
We created a map and historical and contemporary account of the area. This included who has lived here in the past, how the area has changed and what the future plans may be. We will be presented this as a study (as of a real area), with a presentation and question and answer session at the end of Phase I.
Phase II (Spring 2009)
CREATING THE STORIES
In this phase we moved onto storylining. With visits and master classes from actors, writers, directors and producers from popular TV, Radio and internet soaps. Using the characters and places we created we developed storylines.
This stage involved looking at who inhabits our new creation and how they interact with each other and their surroundings. We worked from photographs and research, using the SID and expanding some of those biographies we had already created. We created ‘back stories’ for the characters and places and fleshed them out, giving them a family and cultural history. We looked at their relationship to each other and to the area and started to think about what has happened to these people before we ever see or hear of them in the soap and what will happen to them over the first few months of the series.
This process is known professionally as ‘storylining’ and, as with real TV series, we used our writer’s (the students and staff) to brainstorm ideas and to discuss what would and could happen. As we were dealing with the opening of a new series it was necessary to grab our audience and set up our world and our characters within the first episode and then hook them into the rest of the series with exciting and interesting mixture of dramatic events and emotional journeys.
We worked with actors, directors and writers from genuine TV soaps in this phase, such as Enrico Tesserian from Sofia’s Diary and Bruce Webb from Hollyoaks, to help us create our storylines. These professionals assisted us by telling us more about working on real soaps. The young people enacted parts of story ideas in character and developed those characters through improvisation and being in role. We then moved on to developing those stories into TV scripts. The professional master classes helped us to get the best out of what we had and to inform students of what it’s really like to work on a TV continuing drama series.
Phase III (Summer 2009)
Production and Screening
In this final phase we scheduled and produced our work as a piece of TV drama. It was decided that, as this was our first year, we would make an extended trailer. We took all the storylines and developed them into script form and then decided on what would be included in the trailer. It was then filmed with a professional crew and cast.
The cast and crew for the extended trailer were:
Cast (in order of appearance)
Richard ‘Red’ Redford - SIMON ROBERTS
Henry Forcot - NIGEL BETTS
Sarah Thomas - CAROLINE FITZGERALD
Dr. Clare Hannan - MELANIE BECKLEY
PC Peter Perkins - IAN GROOMBRIDGE
Olu Prempeh - ASHLEY J
Sister Mary Thomas - BETHAN THOMAS
Soko - TEE-J
Johan - LUKAS ANGELINI
Woman at Health Centre - FIONA BURGESS
Man coming out of Health Centre - ADAM KARIM
Crew
Director - BRUCE WEBB
Director of Photography - LEE YORK
Sound - CHARLIE WEISFELD
Production Designer/Production Assistant - FIONA BURGESS
Music - ED THOMAS
Co-Producers -TONY COULT AND DARREN RAPIER
For more information on this project, including powerpoint presentations and articles click here
As we move into our second year we will be developing the series further, with one or more episodes filming in the summer of 2010. Each phase of the project will build on last year’s work, as we develop and enrich the series.
If you would like any more information about Riverscross or any aspect of the project then please contact us.
Project funded by:
