Sunday 15 April 2012
Evaluation
In what ways does your media product use, develop or change forms and conventions of real media products?
With film noir there are very clear and stereotypical elements that should be included, as without them it wouldn't be a film noir. These being; dark storylines, mysterious characters including a protagonist and a femme fatal and powerful lighting. All of these things we included in our film as we felt they were important to the genre and thought that if we didn't put them in it would be hard to get the genre across successfully. When writing our storyline we took these things into consideration and used our knowledge of film noir's to aid us in making our own. In the end our storyline was quite typical of that of a classic film noir with shady characters each with their own private agendas which don't get totally reveled until the end in the form of a big twist. Some of our themes included; revenge, murder and affairs all things that are relatable to film noir.
Although we did challenge some of the classic film traits favoring some from neo noir, although we didn't set a definite time frame for our film as we wanted it to realistic and didn't want to have to contend with making it factually correct of the period it was set. Therefore there is a mixture of old and new in our film. A bit part of this is the way we edited our film, we incorporated some things that wouldn't have existed when film noir first came about, so therefore wouldn't feature in the films.
There are two parts in our film that particularly relate to this, the very first scene 'dream scene' where Barnaby is in and out of consciousness and we hear the flashback this part I feel was quite futuristic and carried the feel of neo noir more than classic noir. The other instant is from 2:44-2:46, the style of how the scene merges into the next (whip pan). Although we did use some extreme shot types, for example, high angle, low angle and dutch tilt to name a few. These can be seen in both types of film noir and both have become famous for the interesting and different shot types they use. Also capturing some very power and artistic shots, my personal favorite is at 4:36 and 5:54, I think this is a very beautiful shot and looks very professional. I think our mise-en-scene works well too, we have tried to make it authentic by using relevant props, like the old fashioned telephone in the office scene, and the classic mirror in the getting ready scenes. We tried to dress our sets as much as we could and put a lot of attention to detail within them and took a lot careful decisions to find the right locations that we all agreed on. We had very characteristic locations, an office, a house, urban area. We wanted to show the types of place you expect to see and as the protagonist is usually a successful man we thought putting him in his own office would show his status well, we then wanted to show his house or at least parts of it to show the audience another side to him. I think this also makes the character more relatable showing him a normal home with a wife as sometimes you can feel very unattached to film noir characters. As a big part of film noir is their urban setting we really wanted to have one in our film, we choose the tunnel as it was visually interesting. But the location twist we used was the church, I have never seen a film noir where a church has featured in that way, but again we thought it would a compelling place to film and the place itself would give us some strong filming opportunities. It was our version of some of the grand houses you see in film noir's.
Our sound also keeps to the traditional film noir to an extent with the frequent use of jazz, but we added our own modern element following in the footsteps of the neo noir film brick as we brought in hints of more modern music mainly the track 'investigation theme' from LA Noire. But the mix of music we used worked well together and it didn't seem disjointed.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
As we finished our film first and the ancillary texts came later I was able to combine them all, I think this was a good way of doing it as they all link well and you can tell they relate to the film.
When making my poster I wanted it to be dynamic and catch people's attention, therefore I didn't want to over crowd it, this is why I made the decision to only use two of the characters. Even though Bones Goodwin (Matt Williams) isn't revealed to the very end of the film I think it will incise people in as when they see him they will be waiting for his entrance creating suspense and atmosphere from the start. I used images that we all took as a group at the start, the two images I used where originally separate but I merged them together I chose these two as they worked well together I particularly like the eye line of both characters. I chose to put it in black and white the same as the film as I felt it wouldn't look right if the poster was in colour, the black and white isn't dominating it is quite soft and i think this works well as the background of the poster is black and if the characters where too dark they wouldn't stand out. I wanted their to be colour and after experimenting I found that just using bursts of red worked best, I chose quite a dark shade of red rather than a bright shade as I thought it made it look more menacing than the bright version.
I also wanted to make my poster look authentic so I researched other posters and found out the type of thing that they wrote across the bottom, I then made my own version. This along with the production company logo and age certificate gives my poster a more professional feel to it.
I then went on to doing my film review, I wanted to make it look good as well as being a good review. I researched film reviews with my main source of research on the Empire Magazine website. I used their review as a template for mine, although to make mine slightly more like the genre I decided to make it very stylised using a red, black and white colour scheme the same as my poster. In my final review I added a screenshot of the film, I chose to use a screenshot of Barnaby Frisco (Luke Jones) as he does not appear on the poster I wanted to show his character, that shot in particular I found to reflect the genre with the spotlight like lighting. I wanted my review to be honest even though it was my on film I was reviewing. For this reason I took my audience feedback into consideration whilst writing it and giving it a rating. As the majority of our feedback was positive I think my review reflects the comments said. I wanted my review to be up to date and as I was basing my review on an online review I chose to include the 'share' option and including links to facebook, twitter and google+.
What have you learned from your audience feedback?
I found the feedback we got very useful and I was pleased that people had gone into quite a lot of detail about our film stating what they really like and perhaps what they didn't. It was nice to know what worked well and what we maybe need to work on. We found that the majority of our feedback was positive. We used some feedback that we were given on a general viewing of all our films, this was good as it gave our peers a chance to judge our films and vice versa. I think getting the view of people who had also produced a film in the same situation was good as they could appreciate it more and see strengths that others may not have seen. But on the other hand we felt it was important that people who hadn't been working on their own film were asked their opinions too. We found that some of them were slightly more sceptical which was good as we got some constructive criticism. We also got feedback from some people who weren't that familiar with the genre in general so they were able to give us comments through the eyes of someone who wouldn't usually watch this type of thing, therefore we were pleased when they said they enjoyed it.
It was good to have these comments as I feel it boosted our confidence and showed us that we were doing well, but they also gave us things to think about and helped us to make our film better.
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
First of all we all sat down as a class and watched some film noir films, these ranged from some very early film noir's like; Double Indemnity to neo noir's like; The Black Daliah and LA Confidential to some low budget almost cult film noir films like; Brick. These films all helped us in our own way and got us thinking about our own film. After splitting into groups we continued our research on the internet by looking at the conventions of film noir and researching and analysing clips and trailers that we found on YouTube. This all helped us in the creation of our own film.
We then started planing, we made a rough storyline that we finalised and made into a storyboard. Using our storyboard we found a script template on the internet and used to to create our own. We filmed our film on a Canon 500D as we thought it would give us a better quality than the flip cams we could borrow from school. We them proceeded to edit our film on Sony Vegas Pro 9, we used this program as it was more advanced than Final Cut. We were able to use some of that more advanced tools that the program had to offer, including adding sound effects/sound track and making more interesting scene changes. We then used YouTube and Blogger as platforms to show our film and the progress we made from the beginning.
As I created other pieces of media to do with our film, my film poster for example I used other programs to make this, I used Photoshop frequently throughout this project mainly in the production of head-shots, production company logo, film poster and, film review whilst also using Microsoft Word to write my basic film review too. I wanted my head/character shots to get across some of the personality shown in the film. We each took character shots in a photography studio using the lights to get dramatic effects, to take these images we used a Canon 500D. After uploading our images I chose my favorite shots. For each character I chose images in which they were looking down the lens as I thought this made them more intense. Each image I edited in a similar way, they all have a black background with very prominent shadow casting parts of their faces into darkness.
I was happy with the results of these images, as an added extra I put the character names at the bottom on the images, I chose an old type writer type font which I felt made them link back to the genre and make them look almost like police head-shots making them all seem slightly guilty before even watching the film.
I am very confident with Photoshop having used it previously, I therefore enjoyed working on it to create my poster, I was also able to make my poster look more finished by using some of the more sophisticated tools Photoshop has to offer. I used curves to make my images look more powerful by accentuating the shadows before turning the images into black and white then repeating this process to get the images just right. I wanted my text to stand out against the images so used the 'fx' tool to add shadow and arrange it in my own way to get the best result possible on another layer so I could edit it without effecting the background image. I used the same font for both the title and the actors names so my poster had consistency and the poster therefore wouldn't look disjointed. I was then able to create new layers for the production company logo, age certificate and credit text at the bottom so I was able to move them all separately until I was pleased with their positioning before flattening and publishing the poster.
Although we did challenge some of the classic film traits favoring some from neo noir, although we didn't set a definite time frame for our film as we wanted it to realistic and didn't want to have to contend with making it factually correct of the period it was set. Therefore there is a mixture of old and new in our film. A bit part of this is the way we edited our film, we incorporated some things that wouldn't have existed when film noir first came about, so therefore wouldn't feature in the films.
There are two parts in our film that particularly relate to this, the very first scene 'dream scene' where Barnaby is in and out of consciousness and we hear the flashback this part I feel was quite futuristic and carried the feel of neo noir more than classic noir. The other instant is from 2:44-2:46, the style of how the scene merges into the next (whip pan). Although we did use some extreme shot types, for example, high angle, low angle and dutch tilt to name a few. These can be seen in both types of film noir and both have become famous for the interesting and different shot types they use. Also capturing some very power and artistic shots, my personal favorite is at 4:36 and 5:54, I think this is a very beautiful shot and looks very professional. I think our mise-en-scene works well too, we have tried to make it authentic by using relevant props, like the old fashioned telephone in the office scene, and the classic mirror in the getting ready scenes. We tried to dress our sets as much as we could and put a lot of attention to detail within them and took a lot careful decisions to find the right locations that we all agreed on. We had very characteristic locations, an office, a house, urban area. We wanted to show the types of place you expect to see and as the protagonist is usually a successful man we thought putting him in his own office would show his status well, we then wanted to show his house or at least parts of it to show the audience another side to him. I think this also makes the character more relatable showing him a normal home with a wife as sometimes you can feel very unattached to film noir characters. As a big part of film noir is their urban setting we really wanted to have one in our film, we choose the tunnel as it was visually interesting. But the location twist we used was the church, I have never seen a film noir where a church has featured in that way, but again we thought it would a compelling place to film and the place itself would give us some strong filming opportunities. It was our version of some of the grand houses you see in film noir's.Our sound also keeps to the traditional film noir to an extent with the frequent use of jazz, but we added our own modern element following in the footsteps of the neo noir film brick as we brought in hints of more modern music mainly the track 'investigation theme' from LA Noire. But the mix of music we used worked well together and it didn't seem disjointed.
How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?
As we finished our film first and the ancillary texts came later I was able to combine them all, I think this was a good way of doing it as they all link well and you can tell they relate to the film.
When making my poster I wanted it to be dynamic and catch people's attention, therefore I didn't want to over crowd it, this is why I made the decision to only use two of the characters. Even though Bones Goodwin (Matt Williams) isn't revealed to the very end of the film I think it will incise people in as when they see him they will be waiting for his entrance creating suspense and atmosphere from the start. I used images that we all took as a group at the start, the two images I used where originally separate but I merged them together I chose these two as they worked well together I particularly like the eye line of both characters. I chose to put it in black and white the same as the film as I felt it wouldn't look right if the poster was in colour, the black and white isn't dominating it is quite soft and i think this works well as the background of the poster is black and if the characters where too dark they wouldn't stand out. I wanted their to be colour and after experimenting I found that just using bursts of red worked best, I chose quite a dark shade of red rather than a bright shade as I thought it made it look more menacing than the bright version.I also wanted to make my poster look authentic so I researched other posters and found out the type of thing that they wrote across the bottom, I then made my own version. This along with the production company logo and age certificate gives my poster a more professional feel to it.
I then went on to doing my film review, I wanted to make it look good as well as being a good review. I researched film reviews with my main source of research on the Empire Magazine website. I used their review as a template for mine, although to make mine slightly more like the genre I decided to make it very stylised using a red, black and white colour scheme the same as my poster. In my final review I added a screenshot of the film, I chose to use a screenshot of Barnaby Frisco (Luke Jones) as he does not appear on the poster I wanted to show his character, that shot in particular I found to reflect the genre with the spotlight like lighting. I wanted my review to be honest even though it was my on film I was reviewing. For this reason I took my audience feedback into consideration whilst writing it and giving it a rating. As the majority of our feedback was positive I think my review reflects the comments said. I wanted my review to be up to date and as I was basing my review on an online review I chose to include the 'share' option and including links to facebook, twitter and google+.What have you learned from your audience feedback?
I found the feedback we got very useful and I was pleased that people had gone into quite a lot of detail about our film stating what they really like and perhaps what they didn't. It was nice to know what worked well and what we maybe need to work on. We found that the majority of our feedback was positive. We used some feedback that we were given on a general viewing of all our films, this was good as it gave our peers a chance to judge our films and vice versa. I think getting the view of people who had also produced a film in the same situation was good as they could appreciate it more and see strengths that others may not have seen. But on the other hand we felt it was important that people who hadn't been working on their own film were asked their opinions too. We found that some of them were slightly more sceptical which was good as we got some constructive criticism. We also got feedback from some people who weren't that familiar with the genre in general so they were able to give us comments through the eyes of someone who wouldn't usually watch this type of thing, therefore we were pleased when they said they enjoyed it.
It was good to have these comments as I feel it boosted our confidence and showed us that we were doing well, but they also gave us things to think about and helped us to make our film better.
How did you use media technologies in the construction, research, planning and evaluation stages?
We then started planing, we made a rough storyline that we finalised and made into a storyboard. Using our storyboard we found a script template on the internet and used to to create our own. We filmed our film on a Canon 500D as we thought it would give us a better quality than the flip cams we could borrow from school. We them proceeded to edit our film on Sony Vegas Pro 9, we used this program as it was more advanced than Final Cut. We were able to use some of that more advanced tools that the program had to offer, including adding sound effects/sound track and making more interesting scene changes. We then used YouTube and Blogger as platforms to show our film and the progress we made from the beginning.As I created other pieces of media to do with our film, my film poster for example I used other programs to make this, I used Photoshop frequently throughout this project mainly in the production of head-shots, production company logo, film poster and, film review whilst also using Microsoft Word to write my basic film review too. I wanted my head/character shots to get across some of the personality shown in the film. We each took character shots in a photography studio using the lights to get dramatic effects, to take these images we used a Canon 500D. After uploading our images I chose my favorite shots. For each character I chose images in which they were looking down the lens as I thought this made them more intense. Each image I edited in a similar way, they all have a black background with very prominent shadow casting parts of their faces into darkness.
I was happy with the results of these images, as an added extra I put the character names at the bottom on the images, I chose an old type writer type font which I felt made them link back to the genre and make them look almost like police head-shots making them all seem slightly guilty before even watching the film.
Also with my understanding of film reviews through my research on the Empire website I was able to make a more realistic looking and sounding review. I used both Photoshop and Microsoft Word in the creation of this as I wrote the actual review in Word then copied it over to Photoshop where I rearranged and formatted it. I was able to make it quite individual and make my own template which was based on the Empire one with quite a few similarities, but I did this as they worked well and looked good. It is also made the review simple to read and the clear headlines tells you clearly what you need to know. Also by adding in my own touches I made relevant and up to date.
I also recorded all of my progress and work on Blogger clearly showing the stages in making the film, I was able to inset images and films aiding my research and development within the task.
Audience Feedback
We asked for feedback from a variety of people who watched our film asking them to be honest and point out what they liked and disliked about our film. Here is what they said:
Beth,
Black and White works well, maybe needs to be a bit darker to fit in with film noir, editing and sound are really good and the storyline is inciting but too much like brick.
Florrie,
I really like this film and I feel it relates well back to original genre- I can see some of the traits of film noir coming through. I think the black and white really makes the whole thing stylized and professional looking. I also thought the music worked really well with the film.
Mark,
I enjoyed this film a lot and thought it was very well done and was impressed how well the genre and storyline came across in the short amount of time they had. Although slightly amateurish I thought it was very well done the editing techniques especially were impressive and slick. I thought the voice over was a nice addition that helped the storyline.
Gemma,
The whole film was very good and very well put together as a whole. I thought the music fitted in perfectly with the scenes to add drama, especially at 4:30 when he is walking through the church. I also thought the link between scenes was very clever at 3:30 when the dark tunnel turns into a coat being taken off. I really enjoyed watching this.
Sophie,
Overall I enjoyed watching the film, and feel it had a good storyline. I particularly liked the use of shadows in the tunnel scene, which fitted the Film Noir genre well, and although I am usually put off watching black and white films, I thought it worked well in black and white. I also liked the use of slow motion. The only room for improvement is that I found a few of the shot transitions did not flow completely, giving black flashes.
Jess,
A really gripping storyline that fits in well with the film noir genre.
Mise-en-scene, was well planned in advance. The camera angles and editing executed and flowed really well from one scene to the next.
Ben,
I liked the film and thought it was suspenseful, but the use of the LA Noire music was sometimes over powering and a bit too dramatic.
On the whole our feedback was very positive which I was very pleased about. But I was also happy to see that there was some constructive criticism among the feedback too which we are able to take on board and use if we make changes to our film. I also liked that we got quite a diverse range of people, male and female, ages 15-57 and all with very different attitudes and varying experience n this field. I think this allowed us to get a more accurate view on what audiences thought of our film with more realistic feedback.
Editing
We chose to use Sony Vegas Pro 9 as one of our team members, Matt Williams already knew how to use it and we felt that we would waste time if we all had to learn how to use Final Cut Pro.
We edited our scenes separately before putting them all together, we found this was easier as we could edit things more easily without upsetting the rest of the footage. While we were editing we kept the footage in colour deciding to change the film to black and white when it was all together so it would be all the same tones. We also added some of the sound to our film while the scenes were still separate, mainly due to the fact we wanted to experiment with what worked well and what didn't. We then worked out how long our film would be, it turned out that the film was just over 8 minutes long. We then started to cut some of the less important clips these mainly included; some establishing shots, the getting ready scene and office scenes. As we had shot some footage that wasn't particularly important to the storyline but just helped to make the film more visually interesting. We also deciding due to time limitations to do the voice over the scenes rather than having a still which is what we first intended to do.
We then put our whole film together and found it to be around 6 minutes long. We then added/edited sounds to either make them slightly longer or shorter we also made them fade in the right places to fit in with the beginning and end of various scenes. The voice over was also added at this point. We were again able to cut out unwanted footage making our film closer to the 5 minutes target. We also chose to make some scenes shorter that dragged on a bit or went on longer than necessary. To make our film look more professional we added in our production company along with the actors names at the start, we wanted to do this also to save time at the end as we wouldn't have to put credits in and our film would also therefore have a more powerful ending. It wasn't until we were happy with the length of our film that we put it all into black and white making sure it was all the same and constant. Watching it back we looked out for any mistakes and tried to iron out all the problems.
One main thing we noticed was there were frequent black flashes throughout our film, once we worked out it was the split second between scenes that weren't close enough together, we tried to solve this problem and we were able to get rid of a few of the flashes but some we were unable to remove, overall I don't think they effect the film too much but they are slightly distracting once you notice them. After watching it back again we felt that something was missing and our film lacked authentic sound so we went online and found some sound effects to add in to make our film feel more realistic. We then rendered and exported our final film.
We edited our scenes separately before putting them all together, we found this was easier as we could edit things more easily without upsetting the rest of the footage. While we were editing we kept the footage in colour deciding to change the film to black and white when it was all together so it would be all the same tones. We also added some of the sound to our film while the scenes were still separate, mainly due to the fact we wanted to experiment with what worked well and what didn't. We then worked out how long our film would be, it turned out that the film was just over 8 minutes long. We then started to cut some of the less important clips these mainly included; some establishing shots, the getting ready scene and office scenes. As we had shot some footage that wasn't particularly important to the storyline but just helped to make the film more visually interesting. We also deciding due to time limitations to do the voice over the scenes rather than having a still which is what we first intended to do.
We then put our whole film together and found it to be around 6 minutes long. We then added/edited sounds to either make them slightly longer or shorter we also made them fade in the right places to fit in with the beginning and end of various scenes. The voice over was also added at this point. We were again able to cut out unwanted footage making our film closer to the 5 minutes target. We also chose to make some scenes shorter that dragged on a bit or went on longer than necessary. To make our film look more professional we added in our production company along with the actors names at the start, we wanted to do this also to save time at the end as we wouldn't have to put credits in and our film would also therefore have a more powerful ending. It wasn't until we were happy with the length of our film that we put it all into black and white making sure it was all the same and constant. Watching it back we looked out for any mistakes and tried to iron out all the problems.
One main thing we noticed was there were frequent black flashes throughout our film, once we worked out it was the split second between scenes that weren't close enough together, we tried to solve this problem and we were able to get rid of a few of the flashes but some we were unable to remove, overall I don't think they effect the film too much but they are slightly distracting once you notice them. After watching it back again we felt that something was missing and our film lacked authentic sound so we went online and found some sound effects to add in to make our film feel more realistic. We then rendered and exported our final film.Sound Track
We wanted our soundtrack to really fit in with the genre, for this reason we concentrated quite a lot on jazz and similar as we felt as a group that that genre of music really fit in well with film noir and would help to create the atmosphere we wanted in our film. We mainly decided to concentrate on soundtracks made for film rather than songs that may be in the charts or well know. We did this as we didn't want any singing in out film only instrumentals and we thought it would be hard to cut songs with singing and we may not get the desired effect, therefore soundtracks seemed perfect. Here are the main three songs we used.
Name: Underwater
Artist: Danny Elfman
From: Big Fish
Used: This was used at the start of our film when Barnaby and Adrianna Frisco were seen getting ready. We thought this was suitable as it wasn't too sinister as we didn't want anything to overpowering too soon. Although we did think this had subtle ominous undertones thats worked well in setting the scene and also a good starting point for the film.
Name: Main Theme
Artist: Andy Hale
From: LA Noire
Used: We used this as Barnaby is leaving the house/going to work. We thought this was quite slow and suggestive and gave the audience the sense that something bad would happen and it also reflected the feelings of the character, his doubts about going back to work and the guilt he feels after what happened with his partner.
Name: Investigation Theme
Artist: Andy Hale
From: LA Noir
Used: When Barnaby is called to the murder scene and first sees Bones in the tunnel. It is again used when Barnaby enters the church I think it is good that we used this song twice as in both instances there is something dangerous going on meaning the audience will associate the music with danger. I really like this track with all the odd notes, like drip like sound and the tinkling noises making it very sinister when they are coupled with the slow sudden piano notes.
Name: Every Dream Comes To An End
Artist: UNKLE
Used: This track was used right at the end in the church scene just as Adrianna shoots Barnaby. It is a very powerful piece of music, very slow and meaningful. I think it worked really well with the slow motion that was used throughout the scene I think it accentuates this and helps to show the reaction of Adrianna through music, it really echos what she must be thinking/feeling.
None of these tracks were royalty free so to be able to use them we used the Copyright Disclaimer under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976 which allows for 'Fair Use' of all songs.
Along with a soundtrack to enhance our film we also chose to use some sound effects to make our film seem more realistic. Some of these were quite subtle but we found the addition of them to be good ones. The sounds we got were things like; gunshots, people talking (for the office scene), traffic and urban sounds (for the murder scene). We found some websites where we could obtain these sounds for free.
Along with these sounds we also recorded some original sounds, like the voice over at the very beginning between Barnaby Frisco (Luke Jones) and Bones Goodwin (Matt Williams) then the voice over by Barnaby explaining the back story. This was recorded on a Canon 500D.
Friday 30 March 2012
Ancillary Product 2: Film Review
This was my first attempt at a film review, I was pleased with what i wrote and how I had set the whole thing out. But I felt was a bit bare and didn't look as good as it could, as it had quite a lot of slack space that I wanted to fill. Therefore i decided to do some more research and look at professionally done reviews and see what I could add to mine to make it better. I had used the Empire Magazine website as my main point if research and had based my own film review layout largely on that one. I went back to take a look and compare my review with theirs and see what I could add to my own. I liked that they had used a screenshot from the film and I chose to use this also by inserting a screenshot into my own review. I also like the fact that you were able to 'share' the page/review with your friends with your through social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. 
I went to get the icons from the internet but I wanted to make mine different and fit in with the page, I therefore thought about changing the icons slightly to make them fit in with the colour scheme. I edited them on Photoshop to achieve this. I selected the icon using the magic wand tool, I then used the gradient tool to fill the shape this created the red to white effect I have which imitated the original black version where it goes black to white. I experimented with solid colour but it didn't look as good. I then repeated this process with the Facebook and Google+ icons to make them sort of my own. This therefore is my final film review:
These where the reviews I used to aid me in making my own. I thought the Empire site was a good one to use as their site is very popular and has loads of film reviews to choose from I decided to look at a film from my genre and another completely random film too. I liked how the reviews were quite short and too the point, yet they didn't give too much of the film away whilst doing so. I also found the 'verdict' to be very honest and I agreed with what was said, this is what I intend my own film review to come across as.
Development Of My Film Poster
Although the original film noir posters are very stylized with bright colours with quite a lot going on in them. I wanted to recreate that style in photoshop but my attempts didn't work and the poster wasn't effective, and didn't work well. I think this was partly due to the fact that original film noir posters were drawn and trying to recreate that effect in photoshop doesn't work and looks very fake. If i was going to do an old original film noir poster I would be tempted to draw it myself to make it authentic. However I felt this would look as finished and professional than if i did it with photoshop. So then I then started to look at the style of the neo noir posters which being more modern would be easier for me to relate to and use to make my own. These posters were obviously darker with hardly any colour or the colour they did have was minimal and very powerful. Using a small amount of red for example to draw the eye in and have the instant thought of danger in the viewers mind. I chose to mainly focus on the neo noir style but have influences of the original style.
First I found two suitable images from when we took our character profile shots, I choose these two as the were very intense and I liked the directions they were looking in with Matt looking out into the distance with a very intense look on his face and Emilie looking out towards the audience with a softer look but there is still something quite ominous about her expression. I then merged the two images together and put them into black and white to reinforce the neo noir feel, also as our film is in black and white it would relate more with it than if it was in colour. I wanted the title to stand out and I noticed that sometimes in the original posters they would put something behind the title like a different colour I chose to do something similar I experimented with colored boxes but thy all looked too server so I used the brush tool to make this sort of smokey backdrop for the text. I think it works as it follows the direction of Matt's natural pose and leads your eye across the page. I then added in the text 'Le Mortel Liaison' (font: EccentricStd) originally I had the text in black with the red drop shadow behind but when I tried it in white I found that it looked better and made a change from all the black you see in the background. I wanted to keep the colour theme going so I chose to write the actors names in red and white (font: Mona Lisa Solid ICT TT) with their second name in a larger font than their first making them bold and more visually interesting. Although the font is different from the title font it is still in keeping and has similar qualities as it is quite tall and seems quite old fashioned. I wanted to make my poster as real as possible so I searched for posters and found out the type of thing they wrote at the bottom (font: Futura Condensed Medium) of the poster and the logos they included, and made my own version that was relevant to our film.
I think my poster works as it has the characteristics a film noir poster needs, it has a predominate use of black to reflect the dark story line and the general feel of the Film Noir genre. This is also reflected in the pose, expression and placement of the characters. They are both in shadow surrounded by black showing the audience that they are mysterious. I positioned Adrianna (Emilie) behind Bones (Matt) as I thought it linked them nicely and made them the main focus. I tried to include Barnaby (Luke) in the poster but it looked to cramped and the images didn't work well together. I think this way the whole thing looks more clean and profession compared to if I had tried to much into it. The layout itself is very simple but it works and doesn't loose interest. Also with the elements of red that I brought in through the text instantly suggests danger to the audience and maybe even love/lust which in either interpretation of the colour would be true in regards to the film. Therefore I think the edition of the colour works well and even more so as it is the only flash of colour amongst the black and white making it all the more bold. Although I wanted the characteres to have a connection I felt that using these images together made them disjointed in a way as they were put together and they weren't really interacting with eachother. which I ended up quite liking in the end as I felt it gave a subtle insight so the story and the relationship between the two characters.
We also merged our posters with images of possible poster advertising to get a feel of how they may look in the public, I choose a London bill board for mine.
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