An interesting experiment in online drama started this week: Girl Number 9.
Written by Dan Turner and James Moran in six short parts, it has a well-known cast including Gareth David-Lloyd, Joe Absolom and Tracy-Ann Oberman and is (I think) a completely independent production.
There's an online forum and Twitter streams for the individual characters - see bottom right of the About page.
In an interview with Simon Brew of Den Of Geek last week, James Moran explained how the Girl Number 9 came about and how he approached the writing.
Did you have to be any more ruthless with your writing given the strict time constraints of the on-screen narrative?
Extremely! We only have a few minutes to hook people, so I have to write incredibly lean, tight scenes. I always had a fairly lean writing style, but now even more so. I kept starting scenes later and later, and ending them earlier and earlier, until they were almost subliminal. We were able to let some of them breathe a bit more while shooting, but even then, it's a really fast paced, condensed type of storytelling. Which really works well for this type of thriller.
Being careful to avoid spoilers: it's tricky putting kids into lethal jeopardy in a script, because if you let them get killed the audience will never forgive you - or so many directors have said. But Hitchcock also said you should never show a flashback of something that never happened, and nowadays that's practically de rigeur in psychological thrillers, so maybe the kid-in-jeopardy angle is another "rule" just waiting to be broken?
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