Evaluation Question 3

Our production would not be shown in cinemas and get long runs from establishments such as Cineworld or Odeon due to many factors:

• Our product is an amateur film opening of only a couple of minutes in length.

This means it would be lucky to achieve a screening at a film festival, such as the Raindance Film Festival. As it so happens we were limited to showing it in class time and arranging lunch and after school screenings which provided much audience feedback.

• If we were to make the rest of film it would almost certainly be considered as an independent film.

This means it would be shown only at independent cinemas and not nation wide chains. This would also suit the nature of our production company, Eyeless Productions, as it is an independent company that specialises in cult films.

• Film Noir is not a typical Hollywood genre nowadays so is more likely to gain a cult status rather than being a mainstream hit.

This is shown by the fact that our inspiration, 'Sin City', is very much a cult film based on the cult graphic novels of Frank Miller.

One way of achieving this status is the audience with an enigmatic narrative image that shrouds the film in mystery. We chose to do this by designing a film poster that we could put up in places that our target audience would notice. The copy included the name of our film, the location of our screening and the time it was taking place. Most importantly though we used a still we took on our shoot as the main image of our poster, which stood out and grabbed peoples attention. The fact that approximately 30 people turned up means that our idea was a relative success.

If we were an actual company we would design our own marketing campaign so that we could reach as many people as possible. This is not possible as we do not have a sufficient budget available.

There is one way at our disposal that we could make our product reach a large audience and that is the Internet. We have uploaded our sequence onto Youtube so that everybody in the world could potentially watch it. From there it could spread via word of mouth. So all in all this is the most effective way to get an optimal amount of people to watch our product.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=5RmESOP37nY&feature=PlayList&p=0B967880EF22D557&index=0

Evaluation Question 2

The actors in our production are male and between the ages of 16 -20. This means that men in this age bracket will relate to the actors by wanting to be the characters they portray in the film. This is similar to the widely quoted line regarding the James Bond series of films, 'The men want to be him, the women want him'.



Boys between the ages of 12 and 16 might, however, aspire to be the actors and want to see the film. They would find difficulty watching our film, however, as would most definitely be rated an 18. The characters are meant to be slightly older than the actors at the about 30. The detective may well have come from a working/middle class background, which is the vast majority of the British public. This means that by casting actors from this background we are representing the biggest social group in the country. Both men are from a white Caucasian background which is the archetypal of the profession of detective so will seem familar to the audience.


If we were an actual Hollywood film production company instead of an independent one we may well have hired well known actors such as Johnny Depp or Bruce Willis who would suit our detective role perfectly.















This would naturally add star quality to our film and mean that we would gain extra audience members that the actors would bring with them. This could include people who :

• Enjoyed their previous films
• People of the opposite gender who find them attractive

By casting them it would please the audience and the social groups that relate to them.

Evaluation Question 1

I believe that our opening sequence sticks to the conventions of feature length films fairly well. This is because it all fits into one time frame and there are no apparent continuity errors. We chose to keep it simple like this in order to keep our product controlled and thought that it would be too complicated to break all of the convention of film.

We decided to make a film that fitted into the Thriller/Film Noir genre. Conventions of this specific genre include:

• Tension Building Music
  
• Use of shadows, mirrors, etc. as to not give away too much
  
• Lots of different angles and fast cuts to create an uneasy feeling
  

Our sequence follows these points to an extent. Our music (courtesy of http://www.freeplaymusic.com/) builds up in specific places where an important event is taking place, such as the head slam. I believe that we used shadows very effectively effectively to create some atmospheric and artistic shots. These are very iconographic, as the still from 'Nosferatu'(Murnau, 1922) has become. This shots almost become synonomous with the film and this was found out to be true as, when asked the viewers of our film remembered these shots very well. The two examples from our film are:

We used lots of different angles the montage section surrounding the desk. This shows the protagonist's surroundings and makes him seem isolated and vunerable. We chose to utilise slow cuts, such as dissolves, to create a calmer and suspenseful situation. One way that we may have challenged the conventions of film was choosing to have no dialogue. We made this decision as we felt it would ruin the atmosphere of the film and feared that it may make the film seem less professional without experienced voice actors.



Film Noir is often filmed in black and white, we wanted to create this effect, but also thought that the colour in our shots were effective. We, therefore, decided to challenge the convention and lower the saturation to have the best of both worlds. This gave our film a feel much similar to 'Sin City' (Miller and Rodriguez, 2005) which was our main inspiration.





Our film follows the classic narrative theory of Levi-Strauss who believed in binary opposites, such as good and evil. The characters in our sequence are a detective and it's antithesis, a criminal. This is a very convential narrative pattern for the Film Noir genre.

THE CASE

As the blogging of my evaluation is imminent i have decided to upload our sequence so it is easy to access :

Finito

Apologies for the long gap between this and the last post, but after the christmas break we found ourselves hard at work adding the finishing touches to our sequence. We have now, however, finished so I thought that it would be a good idea to express my views on it. Overall I am extremely pleased with our film opening as it is of a fairly high quality considering we are only school students. There appear to be now continuity issues with our sequence and the match-on-actions are faultless. It may overun slightly over the time specified, however, it does not drag on and flows nicley. I will not say too much more as I do not want to ruin my evaluation, so I will conclude now that I believe our film opening could not have been any better considering the setbacks we faced with our previous idea.