Asian Families In East Enders

The Ferreiras






In East Enders, The first Asian family to join the Albert Square was introduced in march 7Th 2003.

They were called the Ferreiras. They moved in into the house where Mark Fowler used to live before he quit the hit soap. The head of the family, Dan Ferreira, brings with him his three sons Ronnie, Ash and Adi and daughter Kareena.

All these characters will be known from their previous films and also some of these characters will be noticed by Bollywood fans as they have appeared in Bollywood before.








The Masoods







The second new Asian family for Eastenders The Masood where introduced on the 21st May, 2007.
Some of the main character in this family is actress Nina Wadia and newcomer Zahra Ahmadi. Ms Wadia will play tough-talking businesswoman Zainab Masood while Ms Ahmadi has been cast as her daughter Shabnam. They will be the first Asian family introduced to the BBC soap since the Ferreira family in March 2003 and axed four years ago in Spring 2005.


Zainab Masood has been cast as a strong-willed woman in her early 40s who owns a string of post offices. Her direct manner can be hugely intimidating and sparks will fly with Denise [Wicks]. Underneath her fierce manner, however, Zainab is great fun and has a wicked sense of humour."Nina Wadia briefly played a nurse in Eastenders in 1994. She said: "I'm thrilled to join the show and I can't wait for Zainab to come to the Square and cause some trouble.

The Eastenders source added: "Shabnam's definitely going to turn heads. She's 21, fresh from university and has no idea what she wants to do with her life. To keep her going, her mum gives her a job at the Post Office."Eastenders executive producer Diederick Santer said: "I'm enormously excited to welcome Nina Wadia to EastEnders. She's a brilliant comedy actress and I'm sure her character Zainab will showcase all her comic and dramatic talents."He added: "Newcomer Zahra is a real find. She's warm and great fun. I'm confident the Masoods will be a big hit with viewers."


From the time i used to watch east enders when i was young the Ferreiras were still around but i wasn't following the soap that much at that point until 2004/2005. I have to admit that the new Asian family have really s[iced up the action and i feel that our trailer will be good if we include an Asian family and me and the group have come to the decision that we will have an Asian family on our trailer i was really excited when i heard this because I'm really into Bollywood actors and i feel that they are great actors.




We have decided to choose Asian characters that have no link as in relation terms i fell bringing them together will be good to see how they react because Asian people are loving and friendly I'm sure while were filming we will not have many disagreements to what they want to do and what they cannot do. We all know that Asians are really strict with their religion but the characters we have included are British Asian but we also want them to wear the religious clothing just to add on the realism.




My aim with this post was just to show my research to my group members and to let them know that our plans we discussed sound good and our research can prove that if we work hard and stick to our plans we will end up with great results and i am really pleased for the fact that we have included an Asian family in our soup it shows that we are targeting a wider audience in terms of representation of Race and Possibly religions.

British Asian Families

Analysing The Hollyoaks "Asian Family"

The Roy Family Characters:

Ravi-Brain tumour

Laila-rebel and extremely great in creativity, even though her parents expect her achieve more higher.

Anita-anorexia, bullying, racism School girl that lives a life of hell

Mother & Father have left the show for now..

I decided to take a deeper insight into the British Asian families within soaps.

My main research was based on Hollyoaks as my group had decided the specific soaps we would focus on.

Due to many posts on the internet that Hollyoaks needed an Asian family, they finally hired Asian characters and presented each character in a way that helped people become more familiar with the behaviour, the culture and their reaction to the racist comments that they have in real life. This adds realism as it emphasises just now important bringing multi-cultural characters into the soap to enable more interest in the audiences.

Being able to bring an Asian family will help us get further insight into how we can encourage our Asian characters to bring in their cultural ethnicity and offer our audience a more realistic viewing on what problems would arise in their current lives and what other situations may happen that anyone else can relate to.


The next step we have to achieve is maintaing a specific atmosphere, to ensure that our Asian scene is as succesfful as our wedding scene, to do this we need to carefully select our props and background, perhaps persuade the characters to bring in traditional clothing to set the mood or we could discuss whether these characters are modern Asians, therefore wearing normal modern clothing such as jeans, like in the contemporary UK now, these little changes such as clothing, way of speech & actions will show the audience that this family is different to others, more vibrant in terms of their decisions and more free in the aspect of traditional morals, therefore can go out for longer, their outrageous storylines can represent the panic within Asian families and the day to day problems they face, for example the things that are looked down upon, such as divorce, pork consumption etc.

Hollyoaks demonstrated this through Anita, who drank and was introduced to drugs, following her ordeal with peer pressure and longing to blend in with a "perfect" in her world) society, she manages to spin out of control just to prove shes dangerous. We hope to introduce this panic phase and the abrupt connection within the family through out characters, the next plan is to choose our characters.

Visit to CLC

Yesterday, 24/11, my entire media class took a trip to central enfield's city learning centre were our intention was to learn about how to create a website for our soap. Before this trip, we had to research in depth what other tv soap opera's consider on their website; the kind of things posted by the soaps that attracts the audience to revisit the website and also what makes it successful. My group and I decided to research into different websites; this decision was made because we strongly thought that if we get information from different sources, it would help boost our knowledge about soap websites and we could use some of the ideas from their websites ( not coping them but mixing the kind of elements published on the websites and giving it a twist with our own ideas) This process was quite successful as we all know what conventional elements are published on the websites of soap operas. But on the other hand, we could have improved this task well by discussing the results that we got after we analysed the websites.

The visit to the CLC thought me alot personally , it gave me the opportunity to attain the ability to use "Iweb" (application for creating a website). I also learnt about the features of "Iweb" and when and how to use it. Hopefully, this technique that I have learnt will benefit me and my group by making use more creative.
In addition, we was also thought how to create a flash game using images of characters in our soap; and many other games. This could perhaps be an option that we could use on our website. Me and my group also the chance to create a "draft" of our website; which was done in the process of learning how to use the software. This process was successful as we experimented with various functions of the software and finally concluded with a great outcome.

In conclusion, I strongly believe that the trip to the CLC help me and my group alot; it helped us boost our confidence on how to use the software, how to create the things that we wanted to use such as hyperlinks, import images form the internet to iphotos then iweb. Initially I found this procedure very difficult as I had never used Imac.
But the trip helped me acquire the basic skills that I need to help make my project successful.

Location Recce

Below I have listed all the locations that we have chosen as group to film our scenes. We choose to film at these locations because we feel these places are going to be suitable for our trailers.

School Hall: We feel that this is going to be a really good location to film our wedding scene because this place is spacious and it will definitely look like a wedding scene when we work on the mise en scene and have all the extras characters on set.

The school hall is a good location because it will be one of the places in the film where the wedding scene is going to be filmed as this scene is really important in our trailer it’s going to produce the dramatic actions, also we could use the piano for diagetic music.

We are also going to use on the classes in school and the science corridor stairs. The scene we are going to film in the class will lead to the revenge scene at the stairs were a student is going to be pushed down the stairs. We feel this location is suitable because filming in a school would interest our young audiences and the actions will be realistic and believable because the narratives we are working with are real and these things happen at least to some children in school.

There are a few more other locations which we had planned to film but due to short time we were unable to visit them to see the risks and how we could prevent those risks.



Written By Prince Gonzo

Risk Assessment

Location: School Assembly Hall

HAZARDS
Students and teachers walking by talking.
Visitors coming to observe the sight.

PROCEDURES
They could easily disturb our work as we only have limited time to film in that location.
They could delay and disrupt our schedule.

WAYS TO AVOID HAZARDS
Stop filming when students are changing lessons or if many people are walking in the corridor.

HAZARDS
Dangerous Steps We could easily fall down because there is a long distance between the steps to get to the actual stage which we will be filming on.

PRODUCERS
Be careful and watch our steps when walking to avoid tripping and possibly injure ourselves.

HAZARDS
Dropping The Camera

PRODUCERS
We can easily drop our equipment

WAYS TO AVOID HAZARDS
Make sure the camera and all filming equipment is held with care and is protected in its case.

HAZARDS
Extras not knowing what to do.

PRODUCERS
Ensure each person on the scene has a look at the storyboards or the scripts in order for each person to know exactly what we are aiming to show

WAYS TO AVOID
Include only characters that are going to be valid on the scene and no suspectors

Analysis of filming scenes

In the pic above, Barbara is Prince's mother, Displeased at the marriage
Prince in the middle is happy to be beside his bride, avoiding his mothers angry face
and hoping it can change.
I am more happy but yet serious at the same time because i am serious about getting through this wedding, but at the same time, i feel outcasted by Barbara.

By putting Prince in the middle, this enables him to be the main focus. Alongside with his mother and bride on both his sides, it almost gives the effect of a "make your decision now", tie where he cannot escape.



Above> Form we had to fill out to use the hall space.

We explored the backgrounds and when we eventually found a perfect setting we were pleased to use it and had to fill out a specific form in school to make sure that this date was only available for us. Below is another pic of the background alongside with Prince and Anna {best woman}, as you can see she is wearing black and red signifying the danger coming up. :)

COMMENTS NEEDED

Hey Prince & Barbara,

Im sorry I couldn't come today, I wasn't feeling well,
I think our wedding scene was successful but ive seen it twice now and we really do need to make A LOT of changes, many of the scenes the background was pretty bad and in some, the characters were laughing. We did have a lot of Outtakes :P
But apart from that. We need to initiate a date when we can start filming The Asian family at dinner and also set a date when we can start our editing process for the wedding scene because we need extra time to actually cut out and edit most of it. We need to understand the Mac's editing process and make sure that we make some scenes in slow motion, change the colours? or perhaps just add more emphasise and make sure that it comes out look extremely good.

Thanks for yesterday, was a good filming experience.
Speak soon