My younger sister has asked me to write her a telenovela (a Spanish soap opera) that she and her friends can produce for extra credit in her high school Spanish class! I know a little about telenovelas but not very much, other than that they're consistently over the top, just like your average soap.

It'll be filmed with a single camera and 4 kids (two guys and two girls) playing most of the roles, with whatever props they can salvage from around their respective houses.

She just told me about this yesterday (!) so I don't really have any ideas yet, but I figured, why not add it to my other SF project? I can totally write a telenovela and a movie in a month... Any suggestions for crazy plots would be fantastic -- or just anything you know about telenovelas that I might be able to make use of! I don't really have the time to go and watch a bunch of them but my sister wants me to write this as something between a tribute and a parody of them.

This sounds like a fun thing to do. :)

I don't know how much help this will be, but you could watch the PSYCH episode 'Lights, Camera... Homicidio'(S2E13). It sorta revolves around a telenovela set and it should be a good starting point for some ideas, plus they kinda poke a little fun at telenovelas too...

The plots usually consist of romance, betrayal and revenge... As well a a good, strange murder mystery. And yeah, everything is just a little over the top, so go a little wild :)

You could also find the most recently popular telenovela, get some wiki on it, and draw your storyline from there. If you wanna lean towards parody anyway...

Good luck!

From what I've seen (though I'll admit that I'm kind of dated on it), the major difference that I've seen between telenovelas and soaps is that telenovelas tend to run for far shorter lifetimes, and so plots do tend to be less convoluted than the average American soap.

And, let us not forget that MyNetwork TV (the stations from UPN/WB that didn't become the CW) tried doing English-language telenovelas, so you could look at those as well for ideas.

On the other hand... soaps -are- starting to affect telenovelas too - I know of at least three productions of Desperate Housewives in Spanish-speaking countries that are being aired as telenovelas.... :)

Good luck!

Thanks for the info! I'd heard of some of those "Desperate Housewives"-esque shows...kind of scary, IMO, but really entertaining!