Design Process - Naming The Soap Opera

Names for our Soap

‘Out Of Season’ was our favourite title for the soap as it links directly to the aim of the soap, showing what a seaside tourist town is like once the tourists have gone. However, naming it this gave us two problems the first being that the Soap Opera would follow the town into the summer season, when there would be tourists around. We decided that this could be solved by the Soap Opera still following the characters and looking at the implications tourists have on the town and looking at the ‘pain and problems’ the town has behind the sunshine and smiles. The second problem was that most popular British Soap Operas are named after their fictional settings such as Coronation Street, Eastenders and Hollyoaks. After much deliberation we decided upon re-naming our soap, giving it name direct to its setting, “Cliffside”. Cliffside came about after playing around with many words and places, we decided upon this as we think its fits well with the setting of a seaside. We also hope it will make the soap opera more memorable as the first two episodes are based upon a suicide, committed on the cliffs. Apart from the obvious pragmatics of the seaside we also think that the name connotes that this soap opera looks at working class and is based around a school. We wanted to make sure that the name directly connoted and alluded to the seaside setting as this is the main convention that sets our soap apart from ones already broadcast such as Coronation Street set in Manchester, Eastenders set in London and Emmerdale set in the countryside.