Why 'Vampire Diaries' First Episode Changed Drastically
So much of what Vampire Diaries' fans love about the show used to be arrange in that September 2009 pilot. This contains theories about Elena in addition to which one of the vital Salvatore Brothers is actually 'the good one'. Of route, elements concerning the display that enthusiasts nonetheless are not certain of, elements of Elena's character, also debuted in Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec's pilot. However, that pilot used to be nearly very other. According to Entertainment Weekly, Kevin and Julie have been forced to make some lovely notable adjustments to The CW pilot before it was once released for public intake. Here's what they changed and why...
Changing Perspectives And Making The Supernatural Known
Set-ups can either sink a story or push it towards greatness. Most of the time, the first chew of a story bores the audiences because the writers are too considering exposition, the mundane components of a characters existence prior to the plot kicks in, or, worse of all, jump proper into the plot with out organising a connection between the target market and the characters. Set-ups are exhausting. And that's exactly what Kevin and Julie discovered with the opening of their pilot, lengthy after it used to be written, shot, and edited.
"I remember us feeling so excited when we saw the pilot for the first time and really feeling like we had something special," co-creator Julie Plec mentioned to Entertainment Weekly. "Then I remember us screening the pilot for the first time at the research screening and it not being perceived as that special. And Susan Rovner at Warner Brothers [the company that owns the CW] basically made Kevin and me write that opening voiceover, which did not exist in the script or anywhere."
The problem that the Warner Brothers research group found used to be that Julie and Kevin's initial edit of the pilot felt extra like an 'average teen soap' versus a supernatural one. Although they weren't given this note when they showed Warner Brothers the script, the issue was once obvious upon viewing it.
"What happened was: If you look at the first act of the show, it very much was your typical CW show: Young girl writing in her diary, she gets up, you meet the troubled brother, you realize the parents are dead, and the vampire did not show up until I think it was minute 8 or 11," co-creator Kevin Williamson explained. "When we tested the show for the first time, you know the moment when Stefan compels the woman behind the front desk? The testing score was dead until that moment, the first moment of something supernatural. Because until then, if you were watching this show blindly, you didn’t know it was a supernatural show. So Susan Rovner was like, 'You’ve got to let the audience know what they’re watching in the first 10 seconds. It will improve the test score.'"
Because the whole thing used to be already shot, Kevin, Julie, and pilot director Marcos Siega could handiest do so much. So the speculation of doing a voice-over to explain this supernatural element. The original idea was to give Elena the voice-over as a substitute of Stefan. On best of this, the filmmakers used Vicki's assault as a teaser on the very beginning.
"That was all footage leftover from Vicki’s attack," Kevin stated. "That was all just leftover footage and we put it together and we wrote that voiceover. Then we retested it and the minute he said, 'I am a vampire and this is my story,' the [testing] scale jumped up to the top. That was 30 seconds in and we’re like, 'Okay we’re picked up.' It was a testing trick to get picked up and we decided to keep it."
The Result Of The Pilot
The used to be no query about, the pilot adjustments that had been made on the remaining minute in the long run secured the success of the show.
"We were all absolutely thrilled and couldn’t be happier with how it turned out," Nina Dobrev said to Entertainment Weekly. "Because it was the perfect mixture of teen angst and drama and suspense and it had that sci-fi element but it was still so grounded in reality that it just felt relatable despite the fact that it was set in a fictional sci-fi world."
Clearly, this was once one thing the mainstream audience felt as well as the pilot had the biggest target audience of any display to premiere at the community to that date. This exceeded all the expectations each the co-creators and the community had for the show.
"I wasn’t quite sure what the ratings meant because it was the CW so the ratings were judged differently, but I do remember that [executives] Dawn Ostroff called, Peter Roth called, and they were ecstatic," Kevin stated. "Then by the second and third week as it continued to hold and then people started blogging about the show and then when we unexpectedly killed Vicki, that’s when people really woke up and started to engage. You could feel it."
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