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.