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In television scholarship, sound and image have been attended to in different ways, but image has historically dominated. The chapters gathered here attend to both: they weigh the impact and significance of specific choices of sound and image, explore their interactions, and assess their roles in establishing meaning and style. The contributors address a wide range of technical and stylistic elements relating to the television image. They consider production design choices, the spatial organisation of the television frame and how camera movements position and reposition parts of the visible world. They explore mise-en-scène, landscapes and backgrounds, settings and scenery, and costumes and props. They attend to details of actors’ performances, as well as lighting design and patterns of colour and scale. As regards sound, each chapter distinguishes different components on a soundtrack, delineating diegetic from non-diegetic sound, and evaluating the roles of elements such as music, dialogue, voice-over, bodily sounds, performed and non-performed sounds. Attending to sound design, contributors address motifs, repetition and rhythm in both music and non-musical sound. Consideration is also given to the significance of quietness, the absence of sounds, and silence. Programmes studied comprise The Twilight Zone, Inspector Morse, Children of the Stones, Dancing on the Edge, Road, Twin Peaks: The Return, Bodyguard, The Walking Dead and Mad Men. Sound and image are evaluated across these examples from a wide range of television forms, formats and genres, which includes series, serial and one-off dramas, children’s programmes, science fiction, thrillers and detective shows.
) were pasted in electronically and, as Lury (2005: 18ff.) has pointed out, entire environments in TV dramas such as CSI are increasingly computer-generated for convenience, when to shoot in the actual locations would be either logistically impossible or very expensive in terms of transporting personnel and equipment to locations. Reduced expenditure on extras or location work is not a frivolous consideration for producers who need, with today’s demand for visual style in television, to make their budgets go a long way to make good-looking, distinctive product
shift through dedicated series which ask authors to look closely at a single programme (though that is no guarantee of a focus on style). In Television aesthetics and style (2013), Jacobs and Peacock and their contributors point ways forwards for conversations about style. Stylistic analysis lies at the core of television aesthetics, which also emphasises explicit evaluation. Sarah Cardwell's work is at the forefront of defining the field: ‘Television aesthetics does not assume any particular hierarchy of texts or agreed canon, but it does address questions of value
how to use make-up and hair-styling in television. Nothing, though, beats proper training! Visual (or Special) Effects Designers 8 These designers can be asked to provide almost anything you could imagine from a special prop 9 through to smoke effects, including ‘dry-ice’, major (safe) explosions and other pyrotechnic effects, a collapsing grand piano, space stations, or all the puppet characters, props and sets for a programme like Mortimer and Arabel (one of the projects I worked on). I even had one Designer build me a collapsible hole in West London
and everything that it can do.104 The use of documentary styles in TV drama by Jim Allen and others, who worked with Ken Loach and Tony Garnett, influenced a new generation of young working-class writers. Jimmy McGovern, who emerged as a playwright from the Scotland Road group, was particularly taken with the plays of Jim Allen, especially Spongers, screened in 1978, which challenged the stereotyping of people on benefits.105 Though the founders of the Fed situated themselves as part of an ongoing tradition, it became evident that the idea of a continuous working
costs.1 As the twentieth century drew to a close, lawyers were encoun- The law and regulation – docudrama in the new millennium 63 tering more and more problems with the inherent ambiguity of dramatic realism, the dominant performance style in television and film drama. Realist dramatic conventions have always meant that as much is concealed in dialogue as is revealed. With each reconfiguration of screen dramatic realism, dialogue has attenuated and modern screen acting puts a premium on the subtleties of sub-text (see again Chapter 1). This inevitably poses