Film Noir opening sequence

Synopsis
Whole film- It is a story about a newly married couple who are travelling on a train after their wedding when suddenly the train is in a horrific accident, the bride (Kate) body is lost however her husband (Clive) survives but has severe memory loss. A young woman (Bea) also on the train decides to take on Kate’s life, pretending to Clive she is his wife. She soon gets welcomed into his family but soon a policeman realises what has happened and starts to follow Bea’s trail, but she seduces him and eventually murders him, to cover up her tracks she gets involved with the dark drug gang scene. Throughout the film Clive slowly starts to get his memory back and starts questioning his relationship with Bea. In the final scene everything gets too much and she kills Clive but karma comes back around as Kate isn’t really dead and she murders Bea.
Opening scene- A young woman is standing in a dark, old fashioned bedroom. Behind her is a large mirror and a dressing table, there are two long candles lit on it. Bea’s makeup is smudged and it is obvious she has been crying, as her eyes are bloodshot. She is breathing heavily, and shaking trying to hold on tight to a wine bottle. Tears start to fall from her jet black eyes and her face goes pale. She walks towards the mirror and slowly pours a glass of wine, she looks into the mirror and wipes away her tears, she hesitates as she checks her reflection, and she sighs and brushes down her dress. She then looks long and hard into the mirror. Suddenly a dark shadowed woman in a wedding dress appears behind her reflection in the mirror; she lets out a high pitched scream and turns around. However when she does no one is there, she is shaking and breathing fast and heavy. She turns back around and picks up her glass, then you just see her eyes, they are wide open and her heart stops beating. In the final scene you see the wine glass fall and smash and there is red blood/wine and a black shadow on the wall.

Treatment

Cinematography- Long shot of the woman
Close up of her face
High angle shot of her walking towards the mirror
Close up of her wiping away tears
Dutch tilt of her looking in the mirror
Dutch tilt of bride appearing in mirror
Medium shot of girl turning around
Over the shoulder of girl looking around
Extreme close up of eyes
Low angle of shadow on the wall
Structure: The story has a circular structure with the end scene at the beginning.
Sound: We are using a heartbeat in the beginning scene and in the scene where she is looking around the heartbeat will be really fast and then suddenly stop when you see the extreme close up of her eyes. You will hear the heavy breathing apart from that there will be no music.
Throughout the opening a man will narrate the woman’s thoughts and what was happening, this is a common element in many Film noirs.
MES: The opening will be set in an old fashioned house with cream walls; it will have low key lighting and we will use candles to create shadows. We will use a mirror to create disorientation like in “Lady of the Lake” where you only see the man’s face in the mirror. We will also dress the room with old fashioned ornaments such as candle sticks, a large wooden dressing table and small dusty knick knacks to decorate it. We will also use props such as the wine glass and bottle.
Costume: Bride: a black veil, a bloody ripped wedding dress, bruised, bandaged pale skin.
Woman: messy smoky eye makeup, pale face, a violet dress and black ripped tights.

Evaluation

1. In what ways does your media product use develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
We used various forms of research into the area in order for us to understand the codes and conventions apparent in the genre. Primary research was conducted in the form of films such as Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) which proved to be the main focus film we took ideas from. Secondary research was various class worksheets and homework’s on the genre. I think that research gained helped to expand knowledge of various aspects, such as the narrative and generic conventions. This helped us in more depth to form the basis of our ideas, and understand the target audience more than we have done previously. Film Noir is a very specific genre of films that came to light in the 1950’s. There are many codes and conventions associated with film noir. For example, a typical film noir film plays on the mise-en-scene and uses techniques like dark lighting, venetian blinds, diegetic sound and other characteristics that are associated with film noir. The opening to a film noir is very specific, they usually introduce a femme fatale into the film, and the hero or detective, and the opening to a film usually end with an enigma, which leads you guessing to what happens next. I feel as though I have used film noir forms and conventions, as I used such films as double indemnity, and Sin City in order to get a basic understand of the codes and conventions of a film noir.
The aim of this production was to create our own take on the contemporary film noir/thriller genre, in which I think was successfully achieved.
Our ideas themselves were fresh and contemporary yet still at the same time using linear and simple narrative to drive and make the audience wonder what is going on. The use of enigma is present at the end which is a common convention, drawing and capturing the audience’s attention and creating an uncertain atmosphere throughout the text.
The opening sequence of a film noir works in quite a different way to a normal film. The typical characteristics of a film noir tend to be made very apparent in the opening sequence to a film noir. This is due to the use of the scenes using low-key lighting, which is a typical characteristic of a film noir, the scene maybe even blue-lit, which is what gives a film noir such a dark and serious mood and tone. A typical film noir opening would have a use of enigma, which leaves the audience with questions about what happened, how it happened, and who did it. This is what makes the audience want to carry on watching. Usually a voice-over will be added to the opening sequence in order to explain a little bit about characters which have been introduced in the opening sequence, which is a typical film noir characteristic which leaves us guessing, but not completely lost. The femme fatale will almost always be introduced in the opening sequence, this is because a femme fatale is one of the biggest characteristics of a film noir and will really give it away that it is in fact a film noir. It’s easy to spot a femme fatale as she will always be very attractive, smartly dressed, usually blonde hair, deep red lipstick, and she will normally be the source or the cause of most of the problems, which is why she will usually be introduced in the opening sequence. This is very apparent in other film noirs I have studied for my research, such as Sin City (Frank Miller, 2005) where all of these characteristics are used to great extent in the films opening, we have the femme fatale, with the blonde hair the red lipstick, the blue-lit dark Ney York city setting, the handsome smartly dressed man, with the voice-over. All of these characteristics are exactly what have created the genre film noir itself, these characteristics, although still used today, were first used in the 1950’s, when film noir was first created.
It is due to the way that I feel a typical film noir opening is set out that leads me to believe that we have used typical film noir characteristics. Due to the low-key lighting, enigma, and femme fatale, and the way we have cleverly used all of these in order to push the narrative along past the opening sequence, it is the ideology behind all of the characteristics that leads the audience to realising it is a film noir.

2. How does your media product represent certain social groups?
For my opening of a film noir, I managed to create representations of the main characters, although I focused more on the specific and most important character in my piece. I managed to create these representations by playing on the codes and conventions of film noir, such as a femme fatale wearing bright red lipstick and being very attractive, being shown in quite dark light as more of a mysterious and deceptive character, and the detective of hero being tall, well built, smartly dressed. Our film has made a rather bad representation of 18-25 year olds, as we have shown as we have shown them as drinking, devious troublemakers. Representation of characters also comes through in the location we chose, as it seems that a dark, lonely room represents the depression and confusion the character is feeling, already giving hints to the narrative by setting it in a place like this. I think that the characters themselves were easily distinguishable, exaggerated in their mannerisms to suit the stylistic forms of classic noir; drinking red wine brings connotations of love, anger, passion used in other film noirs. For example the main character we used, was not suited up as your typical film noir, femme fatale, she doesn’t have the bright red lipstick or the smartly dressed style, she is actually quite roughed up, and rugged looking. We have shown this by ECU’s such as her wiping mascara away from underneath her eyes, this mixed with the location and the drinking, shows that audience that this is the ending of the film, or certainly not the opening. In typical film noirs, the femme fatale usually ends up going on a journey, and quite a lot of the time, sticks with the other characters for most of the film as she gets herself involved with all the drama. So we decided to show our femme fatale when she was towards the end of her journey, so that the audience would be left with the enigma of, how did she get like that? During our piece we have created a stereotype of 18-25 year olds, using our main character. The ideology behind this stereotype was to portray 18-25 year olds as being some what manipulative, and showing the audience how easy it is to get mixed up with the wrong thing, and get into so much trouble at such a young age.

3. What kind of media institution may distribute your media product and why?
Should our piece be shown I feel as though it would be a company such as film four, as it would suit our target audience fairly well, as channel 4 and film four appeal to a mainly younger audience as film four has shown films such as This is England, which may not be a film noir, but it is a smaller low budget independent film like mine, and so I think our piece would be more likely to be shown in something like an arthouse cinema rather than a larger mainstream cinema. I think an ideal distribution company for our piece would be something like “Dogwoof” distributors. Dogwoof distributors is a small British distribution company, that has worked on other smaller independent films such as “Antenna” and “Devil came on horseback”. If our piece was to be shown on a TV channel, I think an ideal one would be a channel like E4. This is due to the fact that E4 has a large target audience of 18-25 year olds, and generally just the younger population, that our piece is aimed at. To attract our direct target audience, the film would need to be shown at a bit of a later time, generally after about 22:00. This is so that our piece could appeal to the more 18 side of our film, as people younger than that age, may not yet be able to fully understand the meaning and ideology behind our piece. Therefore if they were to see it, they would not give very good word of mouth to their friends and family. As we all know word of mouth can be very important when trying to promote a film. For example if our film was to be organised for cinematic screenings to the audience it would have to be shown on a smaller independent screen. Then however, word of mouth may get around and it may receive good critical reviews, which could lead to it being picked by up by a much larger distribution company, and could lead to our piece being very successful.

4. Who would the audience be for your media product?
This production was aimed at a small, independent company, perhaps C4, as it is contemporary and aimed at the same target audience we are, however we could have made this more to our advantage and put in various aspects to attract a larger audience. The reason we decided to make our target audience 18-25 year olds is due to the fact that this is the age range that tend to be a bit more interested in the crime genre, also it is typically males that are more attracted to films of this genre. We decided that maybe the age range of 18-25 was a bit tight, and maybe having an audience this small, would seriously reduce the chance of success of our piece. This is why we decided to work carefully to make sure that our piece was able to do this. We did this by studying the BBFC website, and seeing exactly what it is that makes a film a 12. We then applied what we found to our final piece, and we feel that should the BBFC give our film an age, it would 12. We did this so that our target audience is now much wider, and in turn would mean more people would be able to see the film, which would raise the chance of the film being successful.

5. How did you attract/ address your audience?
The character in my piece has appealed to a younger audience by having a young lead role, that the younger generation will relate to, we chose to appeal to this range of audience as the main age range of cinema goers are 15-25 year old, whereas our piece does appeal to an older audience as well as we have shown images of weddings and marriage, which the younger generation don’t ten the think about so much. People tend to get a thrill out of watching films such as film noirs, as watching action on a screen is proven to increase the heart rate and give a rush of adrenaline to the viewer, this is called audience visual pleasures. Films such as this also offer escapism as a diversion and offer surveillance and voyeuristic pleasures to the audience, allowing them to get away from the reality of their everyday lives. The particular audience we chose for this film were male and female aged from 15-21 years old, as this is the largest cinema-attending population. I think we targeted them by playing on the element of mystery and the young characters, using a link between these two ideas to thrill and excite, and provoke a reaction from them. We came up with ways that we thought would be best to attract our target audience, from our previous research, we realised that if a film noir opening does not have some of the typical characteristics of that genre, and does not leave much of an enigma, the audience tends not to want to watch the rest of the film, so this is why we decided to put the end of the film at the beginning, because we felt this was the best way to give that enigma, which is what really gets the audience hooked. We used typical film noir characteristics like the grainy, dull-lit scenes, and the voice-overs, so that we could build up the tension in the audience, so that when we show the enigma, it will also have the element of surprise associated with it. Some of the feedback we got from the rest of our class was very positive, such as the music working very well in setting the mood and tone of the piece, the different use of lighting, such as low-key lighting, and key lighting, and although we did get a few pieces of negative feedback such as the voice-over being a bit slow paced, overall everyone seemed to agree that we did a good job in meeting our target audience. Although it was brought to our attention that we also had the potential to attract maybe a bit of an older audience as well, with our flashbacks of marriage and weddings, which is usually what the older generations tend to be thinking about rather than 18-25 year olds.

6. What have you learnt about technologies from the process of making this product?
I used a CANON HV30 DV camcorder, having not had much experience with camera equipment and other things such as a YOGA shotgun microphone, boom pole, headphones and a VELBON DV-7000 tripod, I managed to gain a lot of experience, and teach myself how to use a camera to my advantage and gain an understanding of the physical techniques and characteristics that can be used with a camera in order to create a certain feel, for example a film noir. Then using Adobe Premier Pro to edit our piece, which gave a me clear understanding how much work goes into the editing of a piece. The music that we used for our piece actually came from a piece of my own technology, my iPod. We spent quite a lot of time going through mood CD’s and other types of CD’s looking for the right piece of music, but we just couldn’t find a piece that we were truly happy fitted well with out piece. Knowing that we needed something, that lyrically fitted very well with our piece, and that was also able to set the right mood and tone for our piece, I decided to look through a few things I had on my iPod that I thought would be suitable candidates. Screening each of them by listening to the songs on my iPod, whilst watching our piece really helped me decide what piece we should use, and the I feel that the piece we used was exactly what we were looking for and did a very good job of setting the mood and tone, and lyrically it even kind of told the story of our piece for us. After all of the filming of our piece, it then had to compress into Adobe Premier Pro, and after the editing it then had to be made into a windows media video file, to make it smaller and more accessible on the web. I had never made an online blog before, but after a while of using it and getting used to the technology of an online blog, I really got the hand of it and start to understand more what goes into creating your own personal blog. I also used other technologies, such as Facebook and MSN in order to keep in contact with the rest of my group. I used www.google.com a lot when I was doing the initial research for what exactly it was I was being asked to do. I also used www.youtube.com a lot when I was doing research on previous film noir openings and how they had been done, and trying to find the typical characteristics of a film noir, and finding out how to apply them to my own opening.

7. Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product?
My role within the piece was co-director and cinematographer, in which I think I did fairly in. Although I feel as though we may not have used a variety of shots the way we could have, for example our main focus was on using mid-shots and close-ups as we wanted to put focus on what was most important in the frame and not to have lots of empty space around the importance. The iconography in the film was chosen to appeal to a target audience, in which we studied other film noir’s with similar iconography and conventions to the ones we hoped to achieve in ours in order to do this more accurately and effectively. We tried to film in excess, filming more than we needed to intentionally to see what worked and added to the text. Whilst I think that we achieved what we set out to aim, there were a few flaws. The music we used fitted was good in setting the mood and tone of the film, although I feel as though we could have made it fit in a lot better and flow with the images. The effects we used were over eggadurated and didn’t fit very well with the mood and tone of the piece, taking away the significance away from the story a bit and not quite building the atmosphere we had hoped for. The titles and typeface we used were not far off the mark, yet did not look good of the genre; and the performances could have been better. Having been asked to make two previous, much smaller, pieces of work I felt rather confident about getting out there, and creating my own film noir opening, but it’s not until I look back at my first two tasks I realise how far I have actually come and how much I have actually learnt from all of this. Some of the errors that were made in the preliminary exercise, such as rule of thirds, 180 degree line, the use of different shots and angles, didn’t really occur to me when creating my own film noir opening. Although these things proved to be such a big issue when creating my initial tasks. I have learnt an awful lot during the making of this coursework that I didn’t know before. I never before understood and appreciated how much effort and planning actually goes into the making of a 3 minute clip. I had no idea of what film noir even was when I first started, but since then I have learnt about the genre, narrative, messages and ideology, institution, ECMS, representation and how to attract a specific target audience.

All in all I think that we as a group achieved what we set out to do, and create a contemporary film noir of reasonable standards.