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.

Its Christmas!

Me and the blog are taking a two week break so for time being it will be closed until the end of the festive period.
Ta for now.

Re-shoot Reflections

Our Re-shoot went well on Monday Night as we got all we needed to get done in a relatively short period of time without having to compromise or cut corners. After our actors were ready we began the painstaking process of setting the detectives desk up exactly the same as on the previous shoots to avoid continuity problems. After we completed the inside shots we ventured outside and began to set up the lighting equipment which we are now accustomed to. We shot what we needed and managed to finally get a good shadow on the wall for our climax shot. One problem that we encountered was that the floodlights were on in the park next to the alley and hadn't been on the previous weekends. This means that the lighting is slightly different on the shots we captured from yesterday. We believe, however, that this can easily be fixed by fiddling around with the Lighting effects tool on Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Re-Shoot Reflections

Our Reshoot went very well and we managed to obtain all of the shots that we needed to perfect. We always took a few new ones so that we had more options while in the edit suite. One problem that we noticed was the change in light outside as the floodlights were on on the playing field. This should be able to be fixed when editing though.

Efficiency is Key

I believe that we worked faily efficiently over the weekend and this is shown by the fact that we managed to get takes of all the shots in our sequence. We had a few giggles along the way but the main thing is that we reached our target. Next time as a word of warning, I think that It would be wise to wear multiple pairs of socks as it is only a matter of time until one of us is ridden with frostbite.

1st Shoot Weekend Reflections

Although that this should be our second shoot weekend it has turned out to be our first due to previous problems. This, however, drove us to try extra hard to get all of the footage we need to edit next week. We went on late into the night and did well to keep the camera steady in the bitter cold. It was, however, a very successful shoot and has got us back on track.