It was after shooting our individual exercises that I developed a rough idea of what I wanted to focus on for the rest of the semester. After watching a class mate creatively shoot a monologue for their experiment, I was reminded of Kevin Spacey’s performance in the T.V drama House of Cards. In this show he plays a disgruntled political figure that often divulges his private plans/thoughts to the audience through a monologue. With this particular style of monologue Spacey breaks the fourth wall and directly addressees the audience. After studying and contemplating coverage in class for a few weeks, I decided that I would look at the coverage of monologues for my individual project.

Excited about the prospects of my idea, I headed to Robin immediately to ask his advice and help expand my idea. Robin gave me some helpful things to consider around the construction of monologues. This led me to develop some questions I could investigate.
These included:
-How are monologues covered?
-How are they transitioned in and out of?
-What constitutes a successful monologue?
-What doesn’t work and can be quite jarring to an audience?

After sleeping on this idea, I decided to slightly narrow my investigation to specifically, the coverage of monologues in TV dramas. I chose to exclude looking at monologues from films, as I perceive monologues in film to be quite a common occurrence and they are easily segued into and out of. Therefore Monologues in T.V dramas are quite unique.

For my presentation I knew I would be showing a clip from House of Cards, as it was the source of my inspiration. The scene I chose is a favourite of mine and had quite an impact on me the first time I saw it. The second clip I chose is from Gossip Girl. I chose this clip as it is vastly different to the first and will provide some variety in my experiments. It is a more typical style of monologue in which a letter is read aloud. This heightens the significance of the letter and adds emotion that would otherwise be excluded with just a standard voice over.

Ultimately, I’d like to recreate different monologue scenes from various T.V shows as close as I possibly can and reflect on these. Eventually, I hope to write my own monologue and develop my own coverage.

House of Cards

Gossip Girl