When researching for inspiration with TV Series. Breaking Bad really caught my attention with a style they went for.
Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White, an overqualified High School Chemistry teacher who gets diagnosed with lung cancer and starts to cook Methamphetamine (Meth) with an old student Jessie Pinkman to help get money to care for his family when he dies. As the series goes on, Walter becomes mad with power and this actually changes him from the victim into the actual villain of the entire story. The writers for this series were very creative and clever with how they did this. They simply put someone worse than Walter into the story to take attention away from him, until finally you see the monster that he has become at the end. Breaking Bad is classed as the greatest TV series of all time with some of the greatest characters ever brought to our screens from it. What I took from this series was the montage style that it became so famous for.
Breaking Bad has a variety of Directors for each episode. However, it's creator Vince Gilligan, specifically had the idea of montages in mind within the script and left it to the directors (which he was one) to decide how that would be done. Although he would always look over the final edit at the end before it went out for airing. With the episodes I watched, each had a different style of montage but all gave the same effect which was the passage of time. The first I watched was in episode 6 of the first series, where Jessie is going around selling his and Walter's Meth.
The footage is a mixture of close ups, wides and mid shots. All hand held footage and even crossing the line at times. The montage sequence works as the music is relaxing and shows how easy Jessie can sell the drugs. As well this gets an entire day done in less than 2 minutes and it keeps the audience interested by everything happening in it. It's smooth, simple and fun to watch and really effective in getting time to pass.
Another example of the montage from Breaking Bad is from season 5 episode 3. This montage is classed as one of the greatest montage sequences of all time. This was directed by Adam Bernstein and this was much different from the first one in season 1. This focuses on the detail of the way the character make the Meth. Although this had been seen in previous episodes, this was such a creative way to get through the long time it takes. The process would usually be really boring but this is really interesting to watch.
What I took from this was that it was such a clever way to show the passage of time but keeping the scene really interesting and eye catching. This I wanted to do to replace the close up sequence that Edgar Wright used in Shaun of the Dead to show the passage of time in the pub and the pub closing down, I want to show Shaun and Ed getting more drunk before the lock in which can lead to the scene of them staggering out of the pub drunk. I like the idea of using this because it works so well to quickly get accross the passage of time and make it really entertaining and fun for the audience to watch.
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