Carolina Amaral

Atmosphere, tension and Love is in the air

PUC-Rio Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

As a Screenwriting Professor, I teach how we may build tension in a narrative
through controlling time. Suspense, anticipation, surprise and mystery are strategies for
creating tension that play with time: when you suspend an upcoming important information,
when you anticipate some plot point that will only be known later, when the public knows
something that the main characters ignore – you are creating tension. Tension deals with the
audience’s will to know more and controlling time is our main tool as screenwriters.
But, as building space in screenwriting is also a topic that interests me, I began to
work with the idea of atmosphere. As Ines Gil (2005) quotes, an atmosphere is a space
essentially subjective. We perceive an atmosphere through exterior elements as symbolic
landscapes, sound, music, color, weather but also through drama and characters. An
atmosphere is something that the film/TV show shares with us and is a matter of sensoriality
and feeling.

As I was watching the Turkish series Love is in the Air (Sen Çal Kapimi, 2020-21), a
scene caught my attention: it was at the same time a romantic atmosphere filled with erotic
tension. How do these two elements cooperate? What feelings does it evoke in spectators?
When does atmosphere become a narrative tool? These are some questions I intend to
answer in my future presentation on atmosphere, tension and Love is in the air.

Carolina Amaral is a professor at PUC-Rio (Brazil) teaching Screenwriting and
Dramaturgy for TV and Film. She holds a Master and a Doctorate in Film Studies from
Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF, Brazil). Her PhD thesis “O espaço-tempo da
comédia romântica” (co-advised by Celestino Deleyto, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain)
examined narrative theoretical questions on film and television romantic comedies. She
coordinates Screenwriting Studies Thematic Seminar in SOCINE (Brazil). She is now
finishing a postdoctoral research on the topic of “Catharsis, Comfort Food TV and
Melodrama”.