The Character Construction of American TV Series and Its Enlightenment to Domestic TV——Taking the“Better Call Saul”as an Example

“Better Call Saul”is an excellent American television series.As a spin-off of“Breaking Bad”,it continues its excellent character design and intriguing plot development,giving audiences around the world a treat to talk about.However,while“Breaking Bad”has a huge audience and the film and television industry has done a lot of research on it,“Better Call Saul”has not been studied in domestic academic circles.This paper takes several main characters of the play as the research object,analyzes how their characters are designed,and how they complement each other with the dramatic conflict of the plot,so as to explore a new angle of character design.Through the study of the characters in this American drama,this paper can provide a reference for the Chinese film and television industry.The results show that Chinese TV dramas can learn from this American drama to improve the depth of character design and avoid designing stereotyped and labeled characters.This may ultimately improve their artistic literacy and bring more excellent works to Chinese audiences.

A Political Aspect of the Korean Wave in Taiwan

Studies of the Korean Wave in Taiwan have construed the genesis of the Wave as either accidental, evitable, or taken it for granted. Problematising the genesis of the Korean Wave in Taiwan, the paper proposes to see it as the product of social and political forces pertaining to a specific moment of history of Taiwan. Other than deeming the genesis categorically as a cultural instance, it argues that the Wave is in effect the production manufactured at the convergence of social political changes at a historical moment unprecedented in Taiwan history. To respond to the new social and political conditions, the Korean Wave is deliberately appropriated as the extension of social institution and political control for the purpose of prolonging class interests of the traditional rulers. By means of mammoth circulation and transmission of print media and television broadcast, the Wave is immediately called into being and captivates a throng of Taiwan Residents audience. In return, the overwhelming popularity of Korean TV dramas is capitalized on politically besides socially and culturally in order to meet new needs. Resiting the Korean Wave in Taiwan in the social and political processes at the specific moment of Taiwan history, its genesis is thereby complicated and overdetermined on top of the advanced and promised drama qualities and productions. Inevitably a limited view, however, the paper is hoped to provide an alternative aspect to the studies of the Korean Wave either in Taiwan or other regions.

Research on emotional space for movie and TV drama videos

Emotional space refers to a multi-dimensional emotional model that describes a group of subjective feelings or emotions. Since the existing discrete emotional space is mainly aimed at human’s primary emotions, it cannot describe the complex emotions evoked when watching movies. In order to solve this problem, an emotional fusion space for videos was constructed by selecting movies and TV dramas with rich emotional semantics as the research objects. Firstly, emotional words based on movie and TV drama videos are acquired and analyzed by using subjective evaluation and semantic analysis methods. Then, the emotional word vectors obtained from the above analysis are fused, reduced dimension by t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding(t-SNE) algorithm, and clustered by bisecting K-means clustering algorithm to get a discrete emotional space for movie and TV drama videos. This emotional fusion space can obtain different categories by changing the value of the emotion classification number without re-labeling and calculation.