Ingredients:
Appendix A: How to select your characters.
Remember your characters should always be in black and white. Either they should be doodh-se-dhule good or daal-se-kaale bad. Any real-life characters with unique shades of grey won't do.
Your daily soap should contain the following essential characters:
1> The central character - around whom the entire story revolves. This should mandatorily be a woman. She should be drop-dead-georgeous. If she is not, use the skills of your expert makup artist. Acting skills should not exceed the limit of 2.5 out of 10. She should appear atleast once in every episode (this is mandatory especially if the programme is named after her).
2> The hero - who is obviously in love with the central charater and vice-versa (somewhere down the line). Hero should not have - repeat - should NOT have ANY acting skills. Hero should be - this is very important - SHOULD be very handsome and good looking.
3> A Saas - According to the original recipe, saas was a necessary ingerdient. But if your story demands an absence of saas, then ensure that you mention it clearly in the title of the programme - eg. saas bina sasural.
4> A villian - any gender will do. But ladies preferred over men (the target audience - both men and women - will identify with this). Unlike real-life, Villian should be very devious-minded and evil to the core.
5> Relatives - Relatives are genenrally supposed to be neutral. They may bend towards or against the central character's good side depending on the mood of the director on that day.
Donot hesitate to introduce new characters into your story every now and then, other-wise your story will soon come to an end.. Remember, the most important criteria for a successful and famouns soap opera is how much longer it can run with more episodes and more seasons, than the original story would have ever allowed.
Appendix B: The element of Surprise: Surprisingly Garnishing :-P ...
The element of Surprise: Sprinkle some surprise in every episode. The surprise need not be surprising, just a same old twist in the same old tale will do. Take the help of Fate and God for this purpose.
Fate: Fate will play an important role in every episode. Use fate to ensure that something bad will happen to the central character or her side-kicks (like her lover / husband / close family) in every episode.
God / Goddess: Take God's help whenever required in the story. Unlike real-life, wherever fate creates problems for the central character, then God will always come to their rescue.
Appendix C: The Tragedy of Comedy
How to make your audience laugh: During a (supposedly) comic sequence, just add background laughter sound. This will let the audience know that this part was supposed to be a funny and that they are supposed to laugh. Now-a-days one need not have genuinely witty dialogs or originally comic situations to make people laugh. A much-re-used old joke, a genuine PJ or a piece of ridiculously over-done acting is sufficient to make now-a-days-audience laugh...
Appendix D: The Don'ts
Always avoid any real-life situation or character-sketches. If it was supposed to show real-life drama, then your programme would have been a documentary, not a daily soap opera. Practical and plausible situations have no place in a soap opera - in the same way as they have no place in the minds of story writers, directors as well as the target audience who make such programmes a hit and a success.
- Good looking actors - with poor acting skills
- A very short story based on a very poorly-developed idea
- Expert makeup artist
- Stuntman turned cameraman
- A good fashion designer - to design fancy clothes for all actors to wear onscreen
- A really big house with lot of rooms
- A really big family
- and lots and lots of glycerine.
- Take some sos - i.e. same-old-story. Beat and knead the dough of your story so much that it becomes as soft and stretchable as chewing-gum. This will ensure that you can stretch the programme as much as you like.
- Add to it a bunch of assorted good, evil and neutral characters. Stir them well through out the story.
- Use an expert makeup artist to garnish your charaters with drop dead good looks.
- With the help of a good fashion designer, add appropriate dressing for your characters. The dressing should be in accordance with latest fashion for the main characters, and it should be fancy-dress-style traditional dressing for the other side characters ("fancy-dress-like" because nobody really dresses up that traditionally in real life now-a-days).
- Stick the characters together on grill-sticks to make them a part of a really big family. Encase them within the wrapping of an impossibly big house with lots of rooms.
- Put some tadka of jealousy, passion and wealth to the overall preparation.
- Add lots of masala. The more the masala, the better.
- Add ample quantities of glycerin to moisten each episode and make it nicely mushy.
- Garnish your preparation with a huge dollop of the element of surprise.
- Sprinkle some crystals of comedy if required.
- Add salt of realism to taste.
- Keep the preparation to boil over the heat of Love, hate, tragedy and family values.
- Allow the preparation to simmer for a while over advertisements.
- Decorate your dish with skilled camera-craftsmanship (example zooming in on actor's faces, panning the camera across an actor's face from all possible directions, etc.)
- Now chop up the story base thus formed in really small pieces. Call each such piece an episode.
- Serve each episode over TV channel during dinner time between generous helpings of Advertisements.
Appendix A: How to select your characters.
Remember your characters should always be in black and white. Either they should be doodh-se-dhule good or daal-se-kaale bad. Any real-life characters with unique shades of grey won't do.
Your daily soap should contain the following essential characters:
1> The central character - around whom the entire story revolves. This should mandatorily be a woman. She should be drop-dead-georgeous. If she is not, use the skills of your expert makup artist. Acting skills should not exceed the limit of 2.5 out of 10. She should appear atleast once in every episode (this is mandatory especially if the programme is named after her).
2> The hero - who is obviously in love with the central charater and vice-versa (somewhere down the line). Hero should not have - repeat - should NOT have ANY acting skills. Hero should be - this is very important - SHOULD be very handsome and good looking.
3> A Saas - According to the original recipe, saas was a necessary ingerdient. But if your story demands an absence of saas, then ensure that you mention it clearly in the title of the programme - eg. saas bina sasural.
4> A villian - any gender will do. But ladies preferred over men (the target audience - both men and women - will identify with this). Unlike real-life, Villian should be very devious-minded and evil to the core.
5> Relatives - Relatives are genenrally supposed to be neutral. They may bend towards or against the central character's good side depending on the mood of the director on that day.
Donot hesitate to introduce new characters into your story every now and then, other-wise your story will soon come to an end.. Remember, the most important criteria for a successful and famouns soap opera is how much longer it can run with more episodes and more seasons, than the original story would have ever allowed.
Appendix B: The element of Surprise: Surprisingly Garnishing :-P ...
The element of Surprise: Sprinkle some surprise in every episode. The surprise need not be surprising, just a same old twist in the same old tale will do. Take the help of Fate and God for this purpose.
Fate: Fate will play an important role in every episode. Use fate to ensure that something bad will happen to the central character or her side-kicks (like her lover / husband / close family) in every episode.
God / Goddess: Take God's help whenever required in the story. Unlike real-life, wherever fate creates problems for the central character, then God will always come to their rescue.
Appendix C: The Tragedy of Comedy
How to make your audience laugh: During a (supposedly) comic sequence, just add background laughter sound. This will let the audience know that this part was supposed to be a funny and that they are supposed to laugh. Now-a-days one need not have genuinely witty dialogs or originally comic situations to make people laugh. A much-re-used old joke, a genuine PJ or a piece of ridiculously over-done acting is sufficient to make now-a-days-audience laugh...
Appendix D: The Don'ts
Always avoid any real-life situation or character-sketches. If it was supposed to show real-life drama, then your programme would have been a documentary, not a daily soap opera. Practical and plausible situations have no place in a soap opera - in the same way as they have no place in the minds of story writers, directors as well as the target audience who make such programmes a hit and a success.
1 comment:
That's awesome Anup.... dude u r rocking...
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