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.