The 50th anniversary of Corrie has lead to the writers to commemorate the occasion by attempting to do what is known in filmmaking jargon as an attempt at "Jumping the Shark", and to give them credit they pulled it off pretty well. I mean it's not like these people are accustomed to filming "Die Hard" for a living, but that aside, the Corrie Tram crash over Leanne and Peters bar (I've forgotten what it's called and can't be arsed googling it.) was pulled off pretty well I think, and that got me thinking. This scene cost about one million pounds to film, that is equivalent to about under a minutes film time of "Avatar" and "Revenge of the Sith", but it was more exciting than any scene in those films. A magic tree falling down in Alpha Centauri and a lightsaber duel on a volcanic world were outdone by a pub with dodgy gas fittings blowing up, and a fake tram landing in a pretend paper shop in a studio in a city in the North. I would well imagine that both George Lucas and James Cameron would have spent ten times as much on a scene like this with the resources they have. They would have set up all the right camera angles for optimum viewing position for the audience. Spent months setting up CGI shots and hired trained stunt men to do the leap on the ground as the concussion from the explosion hits them. It would have been choreographed, crisp, too perfect. And that is the problem with some of these big budget films. The Corrie scenes were done on as lower budget, with less sophisticated technology, but it seemed more real. There was real rubble and fire and chaos. It was more arbitrary with the demands on time and budget constraints (and it was also an outdoor location shoot -well the scenes inside the wreckage aren't, - which brings up other problems), it was in short more realistic and exciting, as that is what these sorts of things are in real life, chaotic and out of the blue, messy. It felt real as nothing on Avatar or the Star Wars prequels, which sprung from the binary code of a graphics program did. As Red Letter Media accurately said, a little bit of the magic was lost when CGI overkill came into play. It's all a bit too clean and perfect to be plausible.
A good example of my theory that less can sometimes be more was in another soap "Emmerdale". They jumped the shark with a plane crash, but because of the low budget they could show little of the actual event. The explosion was seen in the reflection of a car window, and a burning line torch dangled off the side of an unseen filming truck was supposed to be one of the burning wings of the doomed airliner landing on the road into the village, and that worked surprisingly well. In reality something like that would be totally out of the blue, a totally surreal experience of a rain of fire descending on the hapless village arbitrarily raining carnage from above. If Emmerdale had had 20 million to do that scene and today's FX tech, I don't think they could have matched the simple effectiveness of those scenes.
As with a lot of Corrie it is the little things in the script, and the high standard of writing that makes the episode. It looks like goodnight Vienna for Sunita, I defy anyone to have remained stiff lipped when Dev broke down with guilt admitting she wouldn't have been in the shop at all if he hadn't made her work a shift instead of going to the hen do. Or how they are prolonging the suspense by having them trapped under all that very unstable rubble that I have a feeling will not be standing for much longer. It's guesswork figuring out the other two may be who have a one way ticket to soap heaven. Or a clever scene when they are so wrapped up with the main explosion, they don't realise a surrounding house is on well alight until they feel the heat from the window, who else is unnaccounted for?
It's pretty exciting stuff I know that.
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