The virtues of 'soap opera'

Australian actor Margot Robbie is about to hit the big time, starring in the new Richard Curtis romantic comedy, About Time. She is also soon to be seen as the leading lady, opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, in The Wolf of Wall Street  directed by Martin Scorsese.

Soap opera actors don't get enough recognition for their technical skill, she insists. "It's harder that anyone gives it credit for. A movie shoot is six months for two hours of film. We shot an episode a day. There are three cameras, booms everywhere, you have to hit your mark perfectly every time. There's no room for error. If you screw up, that's tough, it's going on air. And all people say is... 'Oh, it's just cheesy melodramatic acting'..."

Margot, twenty-three years old, reminds us of the skills she learned while working in an ongoing role for three years in the legendary Australian soap opera Neighbours.

An episode a day? Yes, if one extrapolates from the complex production logistics behind the weekly output of five episodes.

When I made the discovery that 115 minutes of narrative audio-visual fiction content could be fabricated in just a week... rather than six months... it was a revelation. More storytelling could only be better, in my view.

Even if 'soap opera', as appointment-to-view programming, will never work as well as in the past for linear broadcast channels, the production methods will, I think, be re-discovered. The conventional soaps such as those I was involved with in the nineties were wonderfully cost efficient. Multi-camera shooting and real-time editing were central to the cost savings which were possible. Today the equivalent technologies are more flexible,less cumbersome and very much cheaper.

I wonder who will make the breakthrough with episodes of serial drama shot on three high-def DSLR cameras or even next-gen iPhones?