Whitechapel- Influences for narrative and cinematography

Over the last couple of years, The ITV series 'Whitechapel" has aired with much success and and interest. The series itself is a Crime/Mystery series where Detectives in London's Whitechapel district are given the task of dealing with murders which are replications of Historic crimes which with modern policing and forensics they try to solve and catch the culprit.
Most of the crimes featured in the show are well known , for example the first and second series where the murders echo the work of the infamous "Jack the Ripper" murders and in the second season "The Krey twins", both series were ingeniously done so the audience would go along with the characters and see the crime scenes or events taking place that were shot in such a way that they were incredibly similar to the original crimes , even down to location in some places. The audience is also given an indepth insight into the original crime through the help of the Detectives , though mainly through Edward Buchan, a Ripperologist from the first series who through the course of the next two seasons has provided everyone with detailed documents and research into each murder that takes place with the help of his archives of information, he often provides the protagonist DI Chandler with original documents on the cases ect which they then use to track the modern murderer.

The show is brilliant for engaging its audience and keeps us in suspense until the very end, it treats the audience with a mulitiude of interesting and often scary shots such as POV's from the Murderer and jerky editing that startles the viewer and confuses or misleads them .

I found this series incredible to watch as It subtlety gets the viewer interested in the crimes so that they then go and research into it to see if they can predict what will happen in the next episode, it engages the audience and coincidentally in the third season used three obscure stories as influence for crimes  : The Ratcliff Highway murders, The mysterious Themes Torso Mysteries that dominated illustrated newpapers only weeks before the Ripper Murders and the notorious Berkely Square and Bloody Bones/Bogeyman tales that shocked and frightened  the victorian public .
I felt very happy watching this recent series as these stories are ones that since beginning  this project had been looking into as potential stories to illustrate, although when I told people about them prior to them being on the show they weren't that interested , since being shown on Whitechapel these stories have become talking points for some people and people have been looking into what little information there is on them.



featurette on the first series of 'Whitechapel"






This gives me faith in my own work of illustrating the stories from this era and making it interesting for a modern Audience and  also shows me the difficulties i'll face in order to make the story exciting and engaging for them without straying too far from the original tale .