How does your Media Product represent Particular Social Groups?

The primary audience for our film was aimed at adults, as the genre typically follows that. We tried to show this off during the voice over using older language and slang than that of what a typical teenager would use, vocabulary such as 'Shindig' and 'hoity-toity' this is language that an older audience would be much more familiar with this vocabulary. Also most films that are aimed at teenagers that are made today usually are made for an audience with little attention spans, films such as Michael Bay directed films or most modern horror films such as Ouija where there is a jump scare every 15 minutes. I wanted to make our film dialogue heavy so it would attract a more adult audience. However this is also a downfall the film, as a key part of the film is not heard due to background noise which, when we did test runs caused confusion. However when we showed our film to a teenage audience, most didn't follow the plot until a second viewing however when shown to an adult audience they understood the plot on the first viewing, this leads me to believe that we achieved our goal of trying to make it for an adult audience.

However if this type of film was to be shown in cinemas it would have less of a fighting chance than say a horror film as the cinema is usually shown as mainly being a teenage hobby so for example, if a group of teenagers went to the cinema, the vast majority would be able to see a 15 rated horror rather than a more adult film. Another reason for this isn't just age, films that are story heavy are better seen in lower numbered groups as cinema for teenagers is more of a social thing so if they all go see a horror film they don't have to concentrate as much and can talk to their friends without upsetting people or miss any 'good' parts of the film.

Teenagers are considered to be the main consumers of cinema. Media institutions try to advertise their film to teenagers by certain key conventions that most teenage-films have. For example the first one is usually a young cast, and mostly attractive. The male gaze theory by Laura Mulvey plays an important part when targeting these young audiences, they usually add a young attractive female to lure in the male audience. However with film genres that are popular amongst teenagers it usually doesn't matter as most institutions know that teenagers will go see horror films, especially around Halloween time, no matter if they're good or bad (see Ouija, Annabelle).

For our target audience however things may be done a little differently, institutions may still use the male gaze idea but as the adult audience is much less prominent in cinema studios may try to push films to be rated 15 rather than 18 as they know 18 is a risk and they may not make as much money. An example of this is Dredd (2012) the director pushed the studios to allow it to be an 18 rated due to it's comic book origin which is gritty and violent, however this would be their hubris as Dredd did very poorly in the box office and many suspect that this was because of the age rating restricting younger audiences to go see it, and older audiences thinking that it was just another generic comic book film. So for our film we didn't want anything like that, we wanted it to have the gritty style like Dredd, but not the public generalizing about its genre, another film that was a neo-noir but also verged on super heroism is Sin City due to its Comic Book/Graphic Novel origins, so we tried to stay away from that style/genre all together and targeted the audiences of classic films such as Roman Polanksi's Chinatown or David Lynch's Wild at Heart.

This was our primary audience target, this is the YouGov audience profile for people who liked the film China Town. If our product was being produced by a studio, we would have to expand the borders on the genre and make it more modern so it would pick up a greater audience.

Finally the way our film represents these social groups we have been talking about is different for each character. The femme fatale is shown as frail and weak, however the last shot shows that she's more than meets the eye showing a modern take on women in our society, that they aren't weak or feeble. This is a common character characteristic in films, more so in modern films. It's a trait we wanted to keep because it's vital to the conventions of film noir, as well as it reflects what society is like today.

The detective in our film noir represents police in a good light, showing that the police are hard working and determined, no matter what the situation is. In the recent years the police have been all over the spotlight with riots such as the Birmingham riots or the Ferguson riots. There has been countless reports on the police officers who have died trying to stop them or have been seriously injured. I feel that our Detective, with his opening narration reflects how the police are in today's society whilst still keeping with the codes and conventions of film noir. I feel that it still has the classic look, and characteristics such as the language and the smoking but he talks about how determined he is to get the 'bad guy' no matter who that is, he just wants justice. Although this is not every police officer everywhere, as it's just a stereotye, however it is how the media presents them whether it's in news reports as mentioned above or other films such as Don Siegel's Dirty Harry or John Mctiernan's Die Hard.

In what ways does your Media Product Use, Develop or Challenge forms and Conventions of Real Media Products?

This is the first main shot of our film, it's a particularly long shot and will be the shot where the titles appear.

This shot follows a still shot of the alarm going off before the detective turns it off by hitting it. This is a closeup shot and shows that the detective isn't the nicest/gentlest of people.

 This shot followed a tracking shot where the detective stumbled through the dark hallway, this screen shot shows the end of that where he goes from the dark, into the light. This is a metaphor for him persevering as it's a common convention in noir that good overcomes bad.

It it's a common convention of noir that the detective smokes, we wanted to implement this without having our actor have to smoke so we came up with this shot to plant the idea that he smokes. I had the idea to have still shot of the cigarette in the ash tray so you can see the smoke.

This shot is the final shot of the detective, to any other person he looks ready and able like any other police man whereas the audience has seen his morning routine showing that he's anything but ready for the challenges that face him.

This shot cuts straight from dark which, as mentioned before, is a running theme of the film. This establishing shot is also the first key shot of the second half of our film.

This shot is taken inspiration from David Fincher as one of his traits are tracking shots of the main character. I thought this would be a great edition however, the dolly we used proved to be ineffective as it caused a lot of camera shake. It would of been easier to use a camera stabilizer or hand held.

This shot pans over from Reece to Jimmy and Liv, I did this to show the  audience the positioning of where everyone is, so the dialogue makes more sense. This is followed by a close up of Jimmy. This is a key shot, it's a medium-two shot of the characters Tony and Lisa, it's the first instance of dialogue that isn't the voice over.

This is the first shot of conflict. This shows the kind of person that tony is and is a more effective medium two shot than the previous.

Developing Conventions

The main goal with our media product was to follow the codes and conventions set by Warner Bros and the film noirs they produced. We wanted to follow the codes and conventions seen in classic film noirs such as Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon. These conventions including have a femme fatale with hidden intentions, an aged and rough detective whose close on the case and the villain who thinks he has everything under control. Each of these conventions we made sure we implemented these charcters into the script. As shown in a previous blog posts the character Lisa Maroni (Our Femme Fatale, played by Liv Taylor) was originally a man. We didn't even think about the character being a femme fatale, we wanted someone for Tony Maroni (our villain) to attack and show the audience how powerful he is, in the end we changed the character to a female and made her a femme fatale rather than a weak character for Tony to show his power. I've talked about Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and her introductory scene but that scene was a huge inspiration on our final scene with our femme fatale. Using a low angle shot is how we showed the audience that she's more than meets the eye, she's dangerous, she has a hidden power that could be a game changer, she's a true femme fatale. 

The original shot of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity

Our Homage To Barbara Stanwyck

The voice over at the beginning of our opening is another common convention of film noir. When we began to script our opening scene I focused on the voice over. The first thing I did was create a basic script in the tone of modern day, then I slowly began changing it creating names for the characters tat fit the speech and the speech only. Soon after I added language that I heard from other film noirs and thrillers such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown or Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly. Vocabulary such as "Shindig." To give the narrator help (voiced by James Denton) I typed it as it sounded so that he could truly give the right sounding performance.

Click Here To View The Voice Over In Script Form

Another convention that we followed was the light Jazz music playing in the background. I originally intended for actual music to be played, especially for the opening  scene I wanted to have "I don't want to set the world on fire" by the Ink Spots (1941) however I felt that copying someone else's music may cause problems later so we decided to create our own music using the Garage Band software. Using this we created the looped Jazz Rhythms you hear throughout the opening film. And also the sound effects such as footsteps and the 'shock-sound-effect' you hear at the end when the camera pans to the Femme Fatale. With film noir being popular throughout the 40's and 50's the music that was popular was what was played, and it was Jazz and it worked incredibly well. Depending on the music used Jazz could make a moment more tense, or a woman more alluring or mysterious or a gunshot scarier, creating tension throughout the audience. We wanted to do something similar to this however we wanted the music to be played as a transitional tool rather than to create tension and set the mood, we felt that dialogue would do that and the Jazz music would instead just act as a homage to the music played in original film noirs, whilst still using it appropriate that it follows the codes and conventions of the genre.

Challenging Conventions

We challenged conventions by using a different style lighting. Instead of using dark background and a light spotlight on what was important we had more open areas and characters walking from plain darkness into brightly lit rooms. It was originally going to be in black and white to give it more of a 1940's vibe, however when adding the effect we found that  it conflicted with our lighting style and made it more difficult to see what was going which distracted audience from the dialogue, which is key as our opening is a dialogue heavy extract. There is no Quentin Tarantino-esque conversation exchange, everything said in our opening is vital to understanding what is happening.

Walking from Darkness, into Light

Another way we challenged the genre was including more tracking shots and moving shots in this film whereas typical film noirs typically did not have many of them. I took this idea from the great director David Fincher who always includes tracking shots in his films. When watching a Fincher film, to me the tracking shot gave the audience a main focus while still showing the world around them. A great example of this is in his Fight Club (1999) where The Narrator is walking ahead and the camera tracks him but as Tyler Durden walks past it tracks him instead, this would later make more sense as you learn they are the same person. We tried to create this feeling and by doing so hope that we challenged the conventions of film noir as they wouldn't usually have them.

Fight Club Tracking shot/first appearance of Tyler

Frontal Tracking Shot

Over the shoulder/Back Tracking shot

Last Minute Changes - Semi Evaluation/Conclusion

This is the first cut of our film, with a bit more editing it was going to the final cut. However as director I wasn't happy with the overall quality of the final parts. The camera jumped to much, people were out the shot and the sound was of poor quality. I felt that no amount of editing could make it seem as good as we wanted. We made the decision together to re-shoot the last shots from the tracking shots to the final femme fatale shot. However we agreed that this time I would be behind the camera rather than acting to give a helping hand and make sure everything is how it should be. However this put us in a difficult position and meant that people had to be recast and our previous femme fatale was too busy to reprise her role for the re-shoots so we had to recast two characters. Awkwardly the only person available to fit the role of Tony Maroni was James Denton who also did the voice over for our detective. We had to make sure that the voice sounded differently so no one would notice. I tested the voice on three people and no one noticed that they were the same person so I consider it a success. Our new Femme fatale was also able to film more shots allowing for a variety of camera angles instead of just still shots that, on paper looked decent but in practice did not.

Our final cut of the film is shown below and as a group I can safely say we are much happier with this version and the re-shoots. although they set us back and became quite stressful, it was definitely worth it in the end. We had created the cut that all of us hoped for when first penning the storyboard and script.

Thank you for witnessing my creative journey and I hope you enjoy watching what we've enjoyed making, thank you.

Final Cut