childrens drama assignment: My parents are aliens - narrative

Children’s Drama Assignment: My parents are aliens

A report on the narrative and characterisation used in a episode of a children’s drama.

The Narrative is presented in different ways throughout each individual episode to portray different perspectives on different situations. From the first scene in the episode ‘when swaps go bad’ we, as an audience can automatically see that it is a children’s drama from the vibrant array of colours in the kitchen and when the ‘parents’ say there bored in ‘this part of the galaxy’ its obvious to the audience that this a fantasy / sci-fi drama. The following scene is one of the main characters – Lucy; in school (relatable to the audience) we can distinctively see that Lucy is a ‘geek’ just from these few seconds of being in the plot.

The audience can see from these two scenes that maybe there a link as Lucy wants to borrow a school Laptop to write memoirs and Brian and Sophie are bored. These are used as back-stories so that the audience can get to know and understand what each characters is about and get to learn what part they play in the plot and story. The narrative in my opinion is quite unrestricted as it tells the audience what the character is feeling for instance being bored and what they’re planning to do – which simultaneously creates a story in the audiences mind. This is done so a certain order (chain of events) – this is so the audience fully understands what is happening and/or about to happen.

The audience is given unique access to the five main characters Mel, Josh, Lucy and especially Brian and Sophie. We often see what each character Is doing (on their own) so we see each back-story – More commonly known as ‘switching’ between characters.

Modular narratives are used between each scene to manipulate the feeling of time to the audience. The most common type used is episodic; which the audience sees the drama in a organised abstract series, elements and sequences.

Characterisation is used in a way so that the audience get to know each character on a more personal level, so the character themselves have their own unique stories. To me the five main characters are split into two groups the children Mel, Josh and Lucy have their own personal tragedy that there parents died and where placed into foster care for most of there childhood. As for Brian and Sophie they obviously have a ‘fantasy’ and comical back-story that they are aliens that crash landed on earth and cannot get back so have to ‘blend in’ with the humans and that’s why have fostered the children also while they have to stay on earth they have been set a task to find out as much information about humans as possible.

The children:

Mel – The eldest out of the three children finds it hard to trust people and is a typical teenager. She is quite wary of Brian and Sophie and tries to resent them as much as possible but the audience can see she is a nice person. In my opinion I think audience are made to feel pity for Mel as she lost her parents and she doesn’t really know how to handle her feelings.

Josh – Is the only boy out of the children. He is a bit of a young entrepreneur and likes to make money buy conning his school mates and family. He selfish and mainly thinks about himself most of the time. He seems to be the most comical out of the children.

Lucy – The youngest of the family. She is a very Academic student and wishes to become an astronaut when she is older – Has immediately something in common with Brian and Sophie. She seems to be the most sensible out of the whole family – which is funny for the older audience as she is so young.

The alien parents:

Sophie – she seems to be the brains out of both aliens. She seems to tell Brian what to do. Unlike other aliens like her she cannot morph unless she eats ice-cream – makes her an outcast?

Brian – Is the dim witted sci-kick out of Brian and Sophie. In my opinion he brings the biggest comedy element to the show. He has the ability to morph which he used to his advantage on earth, He helps the children with his morphing powers – which is mostly Josh involving some kind of scam. Brian likes to gets himself into all kinds of mishaps.

In the episode ‘when swaps go bad’ we see the characters form groups; Brian and Sophie team up and spend the family’s money on the new craze card game – The audience can see that Brian and Sophie will stick together as a team throughout episodes – as they are the outsiders. Lucy takes a laptop in someone else’s name and Brian and Sophie steal it for money to buy cards (this is fore-shadowed) and Lucy’s struggles to get it back. Mel takes away Brian and Sophie’s moneys to stop them wasting it and Josh on the other hand works against his sisters and sells Brian and Sophie cards for his own selfish reasons – immediately tells the audience a lot about Josh’s character and logics.