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.