Maxim Thompson - Sound

For our As coursework piece, we decided to do a neo noir piece, as it was the most stylised style of film and one of the most enjoyable, neo noir being inspired by the film noir movement but dealing with current affairs and can be combined with other styles of film such as high school drama (Brick), superhero movies (Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) or even science fiction (Blade Runner).

We did a simple plot scheme for our extract, which drew from the same concept for the opening of 'Sin City', but changing it slightly, writing our own script to go by. The sound to the piece was just as important as the picture as the mood of the piece can be drastically changed by the diegetic and non-diegetic sounds you used. The music I chose for the piece was Miles Davis' 'So What' which is a quite mellow yet upbeat piece with dominant trumpets over a deep base line, this gives the extract a feel reminiscent of 60's and 70's neo noir in which the music is usually quite playful with serious undertones at the same, examples of this can be found in films such as 'Breathless', 'Chinatown', 'Get Carter' and 'Taxi Driver'.

The music also syncs very well with the dialogue, for example, when the woman says the line 'that's for me to know and you to find out', the music changes slightly, becomes slightly faster, which works so well as the wordplay becomes more forward yet still being faithful.

We did have a major problem with the sound at one point, because we filmed on the roof of the arts picturehouse, near a very loud generator, so we had to use all our footage without any sound, and dub over everything. That includes wild sound, dialogue, sound effects such as lighter and gun shots, everything

luckily, our actors (myself included) who filled the roles of the man and the woman were kind enough to read their lines, and it synced near-perfect with the footage, the wild sound was a concession of various clips of traffic, wind and sirens, and the sound of lighter was also redone. As you can tell, combined with the narration and music, that made for a lot of data.





I achieved the grainy sound of the narrators voice by recording it at 1 in the morning after going to a party, giving it the sort of weary worn out style of Walter Neff in 'Double Indemnity' or Josh Hartnett in 'Sin City'. It was crucial to get the sound right so it sounded like it was outside but at the same time, making sure you can hear what they are saying, aswell as the music, loud enough to hear it, but quiet enough that it is not over empowering so nothing else can be heard.

If I had more time to improve, I would have worked more on the how the it started and end, it just jumps in and jumps out again and I would have preferred to work on it so it seemed like an exposition scene rather than just a clip from somewhere in the middle. There was a shot we had for the beginning, but we couldn't use because it wasn't the right format. Aside from that. I think the extract works very well, and I like what I did with the sound.

Thea Field - Director

Thea Field. As Film studies analysis. Director.

I chose to make Neo Noir film extract for my As coursework project, Neo Noir is a subgenre with recognizable elements of film noir such as props, lighting, dialog, voiceovers, colour, and characters. I wanted my film extract to have a majority of the same elements but for a modern audience.

Before I even thought about piecing my film extract together and getting ideas down I started looking at different Noir and Neo Noir films.

I looked at Brick, Sin City, Double Indemnity, Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner and Fight Club for ideas and inspirations, my favourite was a Neo Noir called Sin City.

Sin City had many Film Noir elements such a voiceovers, Slow paced dialog, costume and it was in black and white, but there were certain props and costume that had colour such as the red bed in this screen shot.

This really influenced me as Director, it made the film much more interesting and it brought out important props just through a visual image. It made it much more interesting for the audience to watch, giving visual pleasure while keeping the traditional black and white of Film noir. The micro-elements that were in colour were also very important, such as ‘Goldie’s’ hair was a bright gold against the black and white making here character really stand out and showing the audience she is a important character. Claire our editor worked on this effect after filming.

Another thing that really influenced me was the relationships between characters in Noir. I really wanted to show their relationships without dialogue but through gestures. In my film extract we had a traditional ‘weak’, female character that needed a hero and the strong man, in this case assassin. As director I wanted to show there relationship through the was they stood together and the gestures they made. This is a shot out of sin city, here he is handing her a cigarette showing he is a gentleman and showing she is a lady therefore she needs looking after. So we put in our extract a similar shot but with a lighter, we also had a shot where he gave the woman her coat, which is also a good natured traditional gesture.

During planning and processing we were lucky enough to have a secure genre, we didn’t think twice about the genre and how we had to display it because we wrote down all the conventions of Noir and than make sure we showed a majority of them through micro elements. This gave us more time to think about characters and shot types.

The feedback we received wasn’t as helpful as I would have liked, there was nothing for me to improve on and its mostly said things like, ‘I liked the way you put the shots together’ Which was done by the cinematographer. But watching it a fifth and sixth time through I saw some things I could have improved on if I had another chance, such as in the actual footage you couldn’t hear the characters lines, this was because the background sound was very loud. I did try telling them to talk louder but it ended up at the actors shouting at each other. So, our soundman Max had to dub all the speech with voiceover, which worked surprisingly well even though it wasn’t perfect.

We filmed our extract on top of the Cambridge Arts Picture house, We choose this location to get a old fashioned set up and to look over Cambridge City, Our grouped worked very well together during the filming and all the planning especially in the freezing conditions on top of the Picture House, everyone kept to their delectated roles but commented positively, gave constructive criticism and ideas when needed which was a great help because everyone did their bit but with an end product everyone was proud of. If I could do this piece of coursework again I would film it during the day than change it to black and white because the lighting on top of the Picture house did add to the noir style but was very hard to work with.

Overall I’m happy with the end product, there are still a few blips In the editing and dubbing but we reached our goals to make a Neo Noir styled film extract which included many traditional Noir conventions.

Glenn Shadbolt - Cinematographer

Film Studies evaluation by Glenn Shadbolt

In our group’s short film extract we decided to choose an opening scene from a neo noir film and in it keep the noir and neo noir styles. In our group I choose to be the cinematographer, as this role I wanted to keep the same shots as the scene we based the opening on. When we decided to do a neo noir and noir film we listed some noirs and neo noirs these included; Double indemnity, Sin city and Brick we also looked at some films that weren’t noir and neo noir these included; Blade, Fight Club and Blade Runner.

As the cinematographer I wanted to keep the shots flowing so that we would keep a noir feel to it, I decided to do this because I liked the filming in Double Indemnity as they had flowing takes and lots of good shots. I wanted to keep stylistic noir shooting to the film as if I didn’t use this in our extract it would look like we are taking the editing, dialogue and sound from a noir movie and mixing it with a action style of cinematography which would of included lots of movement of the camera and would of destroyed the noir feel to out extract.

From the film Sin city I wanted to include the majority of shots that they include as this was the main film we was basing out extract from. I wanted to recreate some of these shots as it makes it look like the characters involved have a genuine connection to each other this would therefore make the crowd react the audience will react differently but I want the audience to act shocked when the find out what happens at the end this reaction will happened due to the different shots used.

Another film that inspired me as far as cinematography goes is a scene in the film Road to Perdition

This inspires me as it includes lots of basic shots that put together make the scene what it is. I like how this camera focuses on the main character while the shootout is happening. Because of this scene I am going to try carry the camera work from this film into are film extract although this is going to be a lot easier to do in out groups project as there is only two characters to film. Although this film is not strictly noir based it still carries styles of noir, this being the crime that is in the film.

I especially like this shot from our short extract of a noir film as it looks very similar to one of the films that inspired me as cinematographer. I like how the couple aren’t shot in the middle of the frame. I did this my setting up the tripod and moving the camera to look slightly to the right of them. I done this as it shows the male figure looking out into the night sky. This will hopefully cause a reaction to the audience of them thinking why is he looking out to the night sky when he has the girl as he should be looking at her. Another shot that I was very happy with was the shot of the male figure walking away from the girl’s corpse I like this shot as it is from the girls point of view, it also shows what she is seeing from the last of her life, the guy she has fallen for walking away from her after he has done his job.

Another shot that I also think went really well is the shot just after the male figure has shot that girl and he has pulled his gun up to show the audience what he has just done. I think this will grab a good reaction from the crowd as they would have thought that he was falling for her and he wanted her but when they see this they would be shocked to see that he has killed her. I also think they will like the build up to this climax as how it is shot gives nothing away until you see the male figures gun.

Edit: wouldnt let me post pictures so will do them at a later date.

Claire Alexander- Editor

In my role as editor i tried to assemble our footage into a more narrative order as well as creating effects to make the section of film more aesthetically pleasing. Many problems were also encountered along the way,mainly to do with the fact that I am somewhat incapable of using Macs.
For our section of film i tried to give the same look as that of Pleasantville and Sin City,by selecting one colour and desaturating the rest of the footage. This image shows the effect from Pleasantville in 1998,seven years before it became wideley known as the "sin city effect". To do this i used Final Cut Express to create two layers,one with reduced saturation and the other by selecting the colour of the dress using the chroma keyer tool and then inverting the selection. This was a lot more difficult that using the select colour in Adobe After Effects,however this refused to work (for which I'm blaming the Mac) and we therefore had resort to other methods with more than a little help from a YouTube tutorial (shown here). This method took a little longer and yet created the same effect. In order to reflect the film noir/neo noir movement,we also used influences from classics such as Murder,My Sweet and Double Indemnity,particularly the black and white,pre-1970's colouring and the dusky,dark atmosphere. This use of desaturated footage can be seen in modern films such as Ed Wood and has the effect of making the film look older. As the footage was filmed in colour the clips were simply desaturated using final cut express and gave the intended impression of a vintage,classy and typical film noir.
In cutting the piece together we had further difficulties regarding the formatting of the video but as soon as all our footage was uploaded it was easy to divide it into clips. As all the filming had been done in chronological order it was easy enough to arrange the clips into their order as they had appeared in the original script and therefore it was a matter of removing unnecessary sections such as the multiple takes we had acquired particularly when it came to lighting the cigarette as well as the last few seconds of the kiss. By looking at the multiple shots i selected the ones most suited due to lighting,amount of blur and whether or not the appropriate character was visible in the shot. For example,the opening scene where Max walks towards the camera was selected from two versions,i chose this shot as the second was a lot more blurry and it was a little difficult to see Max due to the darkness at the time. The picture on the right shows a still from the clip i decided to use.
Also,for the opening shot i had originally intended to use a similar effect as used in Ichi the Killer (in the opening credits) and in Lesbian Vampire Killers where shot speed is increased selectively to give a stylised,cartoon like impression. Focusing on a likeness to Sin City,this effect would have added to the comic-book,neo noir aspect of our film,however,in the end this just overcomplicated the whole process so this idea was subsequently neglected.
In order to further reduce complication a few shots have been disincluded due to the fact that they would need to have been converted to a more usable form and were,regardless of file extension,not accepted by Final Cut Express. For example,an establishing shot where the camera pans across the cityscape as Amber walks to centre screen was not included.
On the other hand,some shots were extended or included in order to create substance as well as allowing more time for the voice over,as well as to establish the characters. There were very few close-ups of Amber's face filmed so in order to establish her as a significant character i selected an unused shot from later in the footage and added it in between shots. This image shows a still of the shot i added.Initially it was not even part of our final footage and features Thea talking to Amber and Max about the upcoming scene. This,on reflection was not as neatly assembled as it could have been,however was successful in revealing a character in more detail.
In order to improve the overall editing of our film project i feel i could have made the effects more stylised,for example,by reducing the colour count and giving certain sections a more comic book feel similar to that of the animated scene in Kill Bill,as well as this i would like to have changed the vibrancy of the selected colour to a brighter green making it stand out more and contrast the colourless surroundings,however,due to a shortage of time this may have overcomplicated the entire process leading to unnecessary problems and is too ambitious with a limited knowledge of editing software.
Overall however i am thoroughly pleased with the finished piece and feel that the editing adds to the film noir style of the piece in that it uses typical visual aspects of the movement such as monochrome colouring as well as a limited number of extensive shots as well as revealing shots and close ups. However,given more time i feel i could have added to the neo noir stylisation of the piece by using more modern influences as shown in our mood board. On the whole i feel the entire project was successful and worked well in keeping with it's intended style and atmosphere.

initial cut - no speech.

here is the initial cut of the film,this is how the film looked in rough before diegetic sound and effects were added.

screenshots