Directing - TV Dramas

For our contextual research, we had to look at 2 different TV dramas that helped to influence our work.

One TV show I decided to look at was 'The Fall', which is a British-Irish crime drama that follows a police detective as she tries to hunt down a serial killer in Belfast who lives the double life of a serial killer at night, but an honest and caring family man during the day. 

I decided to choose the 'The Fall' as a show to look at as the TV series focuses on psychological horror which is the premise of my chosen scene remake from 'The Strangers'. The series is particularly clever in the way it portrays Paul Spector (Jamie Dornan’s character). Instead of being a cliché serial killer programme where it follows the serial killer through his killings, it instead does a great job at contrasting his character during his family life during the day and then his killing spree at night.

An example of the contrast is also something I wanted to capture in my scene remake. For example, in these two stills, the left still is from Paul with his family. The scene is well lit with warm tones – telling the audience that this is a welcoming and happy scene that presents a proud family spending time together– something rarely seen in these types of dramas. While, the still from the right shows a much darker and colder color scheme for this shot – reflecting the cold nature of Paul as a complete 360 from the previous still. It also has him a single shot - reflecting how he is alone as a serial killer.

Another TV drama I decided to pick was Stranger Things, I decided to pick this show as some of the editing transitions were seamless - an example of this was where the camera passed closely behind a character's shoulder (so their shoulders took up the whole screen) and then switch to another scene from completely the same angle and position. making it a very clever edit.

As well as this, the show is really focused on character development,  especially Eleven, who came across to me as a minor antagonist when I first watched the opening episode, but through character development, I quickly realised that Eleven was one of the main protagonist. This character development so early on enables the audience to relate better to the cast and their characters - which is shown by who emotional the scene in season 1 where one of them is found dead. Music and performance really adds to this scene and brings the emotion forward, something i wanted to capture in my scene.