Drama Conventions

EXT. STREET - DAY

The sky is a stale gray. Rain pours down onto the street, splashing into small puddles on the road.

The camera zooms out from a wide shot of the road, revealing a car window. Rain slides down the glass.

YOU sit in a car, your head leaning against the window. You watch the rain drip down the leaves of trees.

Melodramatic piano music begins to play softly.

YOU (sighs)

This is so cinematic…

Have you ever done this?

No? Not at all?

Oh, uh, okay, just me. That’s… that’s cool.

If you’ve ever experienced the classic “car in the rain” moment or something similar, you can thank drama films for the inspiration. Defined as “serious presentations or stories with settings or life situations that portray realistic characters in conflict with either themselves, others, or forces of nature,” dramas allow us to see the best and worst sides of characters. Typically, most famous films of other genres are blended with drama, as people rely on emotionally-driven characters to stay engaged. Take the film Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan), for example. Sure, a guy going into space to help save the human race sounds like a cool plot, but the main character’s relationship with his children raises the stakes significantly. The drama of a widowed man wishing to save the family he has left sounds far more interesting. 

So, how do drama directors do it? How do they bring tears to our eyes?

Slow-Motion

Drama films typically use slow-motion to bring attention to minor details or to allow the audience to relish a moment. What drives this genre is emotions, facial expressions- and people need time to grasp body language and relate to it.

Slowing down footage can be done in subtleties or extremes. The typical frame rate for films is 24 frames per second, so a “normal” slow motion can be achieved by altering this to 50 frames per second and stretching the footage in post-production by 50%. This way, the footage is still smooth to the viewer, but moves at a slower pace. For more extreme slow movement, one would use 120 fps and slow the footage to 20% of its original speed.

Dolly Zoom

The classic dolly-zoom in drama films is the camera screaming “Look over here!” This camera movement does not replicate the natural movement of one’s eyes, which can create a feeling of nervousness or give a cue: “something is wrong here.” In a tense situation for a character, the dolly zoom will emphasize their anxiety and encourage the audience to feel a similar emotion. 

One show (that I will be talking about often during this project) that does this often is Sam Levinson's "Euphoria." This teen-drama, meant to theatricize high school, not only uses this camera movement to create a feeling of unease, but to highlight the attention-seeking behavior of characters. As they stare into the camera with the zoom, they are basically calling out "Look at me!"

Narration

In many drama films, narration is used to give insight on a character's current mindset. They may vent their emotions or give further information that is necessary for the audience to understand the current series of events. In some pieces of media, like the aforementioned Euphoria, narration can also be used to represent the unreliability of characters. Two characters' narration may not directly allign, or, in Euphoria's case, the protagonist's narration does not match the reality of the situation.

Using narration in dramas is especially efficient, as an emotionally-driven plot may be difficult to always portray through visuals. Soliloquys are also used to push a story with audio, but unlike narration, they remove a sense of realism. How often do you break into an out-loud speech about how awful and heartbroken you feel?

All the time?

Oh, uh.

That's awkward.