Research Texts

In the crime drama "Silent Witness", the episode we watched was "Choices", which starts us off with a shooting and the following aftermath as two different sides of gangsters tried to plan to take out the other with the police stuck in the middle. There are three different plots running, the shooting, a little boy who gets involved in a seperate shooting and a dead junkie found at a crime scene.

In the opening scene itself we have the owner of a club and his girlfriend who have just become engaged, one of her friends is waiting for her and a big quew is waiting outside the door. A big black four by four pulls up and the window rolls down; an 9mm uzi pokes out of the window and starts firing at the front of the club, people drop down to the floor as the bullets rake across the enterance. The owner of the club is not hit but his girlfriend is; another person is the head and many more are injured. The four by four then pulls away and tears down the street, leaving a pile of injured and dead bodies littering the enterance.

The characters in the opening scene that we see are the owner of the club Ainsley Modest, his girlfriend Helen Roach and the club bouncer. We don't see who's inside the four by four but inside is a gang leader called T boy Thomas. This is followed by the investigation by Pathologists Dr Harry Cunningham, Nikki Alexander and team leader Leo Dalton.

This episode is consistent with what we normally see in a single camera production. A lot of the scenes, like the opening shootout is filmed a bit at a time; you can tell this from the position of the camera, it shows the vehicle shooting from one angle before switching to another. If this was a muti-camera production then you would be able to see where the cameras where placed. In another scene where we see into a disabled mans work room, the camera is almost pressed against the characters due to the lack of space. In a muti-camera production, this would have been a set and they would have been able to film the scene once from multiply angles.