Warning: this post contains spoilers

Richard Rutkowski on the ‘tooth scene’ from The Americans

‘Yes, I’m a dentist. It’s bring your own anaesthetic though.’ Photograph: FX Network/Everett/Rex

The scene is built around the idea of sex – it’s the most intimate and physical connection we’ve seen between the characters played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys for a while. It’s tender. He doesn’t want to hurt her, but it clearly is going to hurt.

Thomas Schlamme, the director, was clear he wanted very close shots on their eyes. And part of this is the idea that they’re breaking themselves down into physical parts.

The shot I am most in love with comes after he gets the second half of the tooth out, and we’re on Keri’s face, and there’s some unbelievable brilliance between where the camera was, where the focus held, what she did with her face – she practically wept on command. I was crouched on top of her with a handheld camera and a 100 macro lens. And we got that shot where you go from one of her eyes to the other. She’s looking at Philip, but as an audience member you feel like she’s looking at you. You feel like you are totally right there. For lack of a better word, that’s the scene’s climax.

There is no special effect in the sequence. There are some sounds that obviously wrench the ear in combination with pliers in someone’s mouth. There’s a fake bit of a tooth that comes out of a mouth. Keri Russell bit down on cork, and gave Matthew the cork as a place to put his pliers. But there’s no special effect or trick that makes this work. What makes it work is the stellar performers, the situation is well set up, and you’re close enough with the camera that you feel like you can hear her heart beating faster.

This scene is graphic so we chose to not embed it. You can watch it here if you don’t suffer from odontophobia

Charles Papert on the ‘Pirate Chantey’ from Key & Peele

That song (the feminist pirate shanty) is, essentially, a musical number. So there are certain forms of vocabulary, visually, that augment the music. The first beat of that shot, where we start with the other guy throwing a knife, which becomes a whip-pan over to the dartboard, really ends that verse of the song with a punctuation mark.

There’s kind of a nice symmetry to it visually, in terms of the action, and also a bit of rhythmic aspect to the whip-pan of the knife landing. It has a different result the second time, which is where the comedy comes in. What I like about the overall vibe of that shot is in comedy, the way you move the camera has to be very carefully thought of. Dramatic pieces, there’s a lot of license in how you can move the camera, especially if you’re shooting a TV show that’s like a one-hour drama. Very often, you can move the camera no matter what, if it’s interesting. In comedy, you can’t do that, because it hurts the joke. You have to be very judicious about how and when you move the camera, so things like whip-pans in the middle of the shot need to be very specific.

After a few seasons, we got to know each other so well that our shorthand – and the amount of work we did, with a limited amount of prep – we rarely sat around and thought of stuff ahead of time. This sketch was originally written to take place on a pirate ship at night, and when I read that I laughed, because we couldn’t do that on a basic cable budget. Instead, we shot at a warehouse in the marina with a vaguely nautical theme. People assumed our budget must have continued to grow, because the show kind of got bigger and more ambitious-looking, but we just got better at working with what we had.

Andrij Parekh on the council meetings from Show Me a Hero

In Show Me a Hero there are a number of city council meetings. At this point in episode two, we’ve kind of been introduced to all of the players, all of the city council members who are voting on this issue. This moment, this shot, for me, was sort of emotionally building up to the moment where this measure is supposed to pass, where the mayor believes he has all of the votes, and then is betrayed by the Judas character, Oxman. We’d covered these voting scenarios in the city council in a number of ways, and I wanted to get away from traditional coverage, where you cover each person who speaks and each person who votes. There’s supposed to be a very strong buildup, and then we see Nick’s defeat.

What I wanted to do was basically land on Nick as the final “no” moment happens. So having shot a number of these sequences, we know what the timing was from when the vote is called – it happened over, I think, 12 or 13 seconds. We’d rehearsed the shots to start when the roll is called and land on Nick when the “no” happens. It was fairly deliberate in terms of its timing.

At certain moments we want to try to get as subjective as possible. The sound design changes slightly in the shot, which I think allows the viewer to get into Nick’s head. But the whole idea behind that shot was to make it as subjective an experience as possible. In the beginning, when we’re laying out the groundwork for how the council meetings work, it’s sort of more objective in the shooting style. Then, later, when we sort of know the rules and the logic of it, we’ve sort of allowed ourselves to get more subjective with it.

That moment for me is one of the strongest of the show, because the camera works incredibly well in concert with what’s happening dramatically. We’re with Nick as a character through a lot of the show. He probably has half the screen time, I imagine, maybe 40-50% of the screen time of the entire show, which is a huge amount for a show with this many characters. So to be with him in this moment of defeat was very important, and I think it sort of allows you to understand what happens to him at the end. If you didn’t have these very subjective moments, the end would come out of left field.

Matthew Lloyd on the ‘Cut Man’ scene from Daredevil

The shot was written in the original draft of what was then the combined script for episodes one and two, and it was designed to kick the show off. On some level it was probably part of a Marvel mandate to have something in there that said, “We mean business,” to announce this was a high-end program, and kind of take it to the next level.

The script is written in this third-person creepy, slow, omniscient tone, where it felt like you didn’t want to do the obvious thing where you’re in the hallway whipping around and it feels like The Raid or something – it wanted to feel almost clinical. Basically, the conceit was to build a real hallway, it shouldn’t feel movie-wide, so that we’re accomplishing a very difficult task in a very narrow field. And I think that’s what gives the scene a lot of its gusto, is the fact that you’re sort of scraping these two walls the whole time.

It was rehearsed for half a day and shot for probably six or seven hours and we did maybe eight or nine takes of it – despite the internet frenzy, it is actually one take, except for the very last moment of that kid walking out. That’s a separate shot, but everything else in that section is all timed out to be one moment. It was such a long take that Chris Brewster, who was Charlie’s stunt double for the whole show, was becoming physically exhausted at the end. So there’s a moment where he can barely stand up, and that’s kind of a real moment.

The one thing we knew for sure was that it needed to be surreally slow, that you should never feel like the camera was reacting to anything, it should just be like slowly moving through. There’s one moment where we do this big hinge, where someone throws something at one of the guys, and we kind of hinged around superfast. Moments like that are all about creating visual kinetics that would be interesting. It really was sort of a ballet, whatever direction we needed to go in to sell the movement, that’s what we did. And then sort of keeping it absolutely calm, letting the action play out and creating the frenzy on its own without entering into it with the camera. Everyone bought this idea that it’s creepier and more epic if it just slowly creeps through the hall.

This was sort of the foreign film version of the scene. The goal with the shot is to strip out, in a very strange way, the cinematic experience. By removing the cinema and making it a purely POV experience – by placing the audience in the hallway with no attachment to the emotion of the characters, without any of the visual continuity that would go into making a sequence like that – by stripping all that away you really let the viewer experience the sheer physicality of the piece. It’s one man against an army, and you’re watching that unfold with no visual trickery. You’re just there.

Jim Hawkinson on ‘The Great Red Dragon’ from Hannibal

A shot can convey a lot about the show, and the philosophy behind doing something. Like, the first time that we see Hannibal in the pilot, it’s filmed very dramatically from the top and kind of like a death’s head – there’s a lot of moments like that. That’s sort of how we wanted to approach introducing Francis Dolarhyde. There’s this dramatic crane shot behind him, where we see that he’s looking at the full moon, and then we jib up and we see his full face. That was a great shot, that highlighted how feral he could be. In that shot, and other places during the season, there was a lot more introduction of the color red with Dolarhyde, which you see with the coloring of the moon in that shot – that’s the thing that stands out as being different from everything else in the show. Like, when we introduce him in Hong Kong and use big red neon lights with a smoker outside the door.

He murders around the full moon, which gave us a great opportunity to use that light, and nobody knew what Richard Armitage was going to do when we pulled back. It was a hell of a reveal, terrifying for us as well as the audience. I just think that shot really symbolized the character’s lunacy – his descent into madness and his transformation into the Great Red Dragon.