Research into Film Noir

Femme Fatal

In film Noir the femme fatal is always portrayed as a cunning and sexual character. They always try to please the other characters most likely the detective with their nice yet sly charm by using their looks in order to pull the wool over the other character's eyes. 

Features of a femme fatal:

• The iconography is explicitly sexual with long sleek hair (blonde or dark), make up and jewellery.
• Cigarettes have sexual connotations of liberation and phallic power.
• 'Dress - or the lack of it - defines the woman'
• 'Iconography of violence is a specific symbol of her unnatural phallic power'
• Framed portrait of women is a common motif.
• Murders indicate narcissism or duplicity.
• Women are generally centre frame or drawing our attention by focusing on the foreground.
• Visual style expresses mood through darkness, both real in under-.jmlit and night-time scenes, and psychologically through shadow and claustrophobic settings which overwhelm the character. 

Planning Schedule

3rd November 2014 - Planning schedule created.
7th November 2014 - Begin to organize when certain actors can perform.
11th November 2014 - Film all of the college scenes, borrowed a camera for the night filming at home.
Evening of 11th November 2014 - Normal lesson, no filming. Filming at Charlie's house. 
17th November 2014 - free lesson - re-shoot anything that needs it, add additional scenes if necessary.
28th November 2014 - record the voice over at college sixth form.
1st December 2014 - editing again and making sure all editing is done with adjustments so add on's can be added for example titles, voice overs and sound effects.
8th December 2014 - add titles, voice overs and sound effects.
15th December 2014 - evaluating our film opening. 

December feedback

You are making sound progress toward producing an edit. Make sure that you take responsibility and make your input clear. At times you are not working to your full potential and the blog reflects this at present. Now is the time to make sure that research and planning is detailed and thorough.

You can add to blog posts to ensure that detail is there. Posts about representation and audiences is thin and you need to follow up what is covered in class with your own research and analysis.

Your film demonstrates a sound knowledge of the medium and technical skill.  You should complete this by the deadline. I think you need to film some different shots to show an awareness of generic codes and conventions.

Add;
Production schedule
Analysis of audiences and representations needs to be thorough

Concentrate on updating the web-log by Christmas and complete an edit.

Creative Journey

This week I have edited footage which we filmed last week. We filmed scenes for our final task in the college with the different characters. On a different day, we had to film the part where in which the detective is getting ready at his house and then we had to edit this at a later date. We are using Premiere Pro which enables us to be able to edit our final piece with the professional software so that it can look sophisticated in the end and like something a real film company would produce to sell to an audience. We had to import the footage and then find out where all of the many videos fit in and then place them into the correct order. Following this, we had to crop each of the videos to get rid of any background noise or unwanted footage to make it fluent. After this, we could then create our track and put it into our film and then change where about the music starts and stops to fit in with all of the tense parts of the film and the more quieter parts like when the detective is getting ready and then the more tense scene when the character opens the envelope.
 Finally, we extracted our film from the computer and added it to Landau's YouTube channel for our peers to watch and then give us feedback on how we can adapt it and make it reach the expectations for our targeted audience.

Identifying An Audience

Identifying An Audience:

People use media texts to gratify their needs for example when they watch Horror films it can be for a number of different reasons: they get a thrill and excitement out of watching them, to watch them with friends to see their reactions to see if they are scared,  the feel of adrenaline that they cause when you are scared, the feeling of vulnerability and to push their boundaries to see what the worst film they can allow themselves to watch is so they can say that they have watched it. They can sometimes relate to then if they have had a past experience that ha been very similar to the scenario in the film. Most people have a fear of 'the other' which is a fear/phobia of anyone who is different to you. 

Audience Reception:

There are different type of audience reception that people can want to expect they will receive from viewers watching their films...

Preferred reading - what the director wants.
Opposite reading - wrong reading of the film.
Negotiated reading - the person knows its not true/someone else's opinion.
Aberrant reading - Stuart Halls theory - the audience doesn't understand it. 

An example of this is the T- Mobile advert where the are lookalikes of the Royal family dancing at the 'Royal wedding'. The preferred reading is that the director of the advert wants the viewers to see the funny side of it and how it is praising the Royal family. The negotiated reading is that it is irrelevant to the company and to phones. The opposite reading is that people would believe that is it the actual Royal wedding which could be believed by the older generations such as 55+ and the aberrant reading is that people don't understand it.

Hypodermic Syringe Theory:

This is when an audience believe the first thing that they hear and don't leave any room for thinking otherwise or their own opinion. This happened a lot in 1957 because they had less choice of media so when they saw something they just believed it however, nowadays this happens less frequently because people are always making pranks and making things up as they go along. Audiences are active rather than being passive and believing everything they hear they will use their common sense and knowledge to know that it isn't true or they will ask someone else to get their opinion on the matter. 

A lot of viral advertising happens now too when you see something that is funny you are more likely to send and share it with your friends on different social media like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and vine.

The Detective in Film Noir

The Detective in Film Noir:

What does representation mean?
The representation of something of how something is portrayed. When portraying a person these factors are tenderly used.
Age
Gender
Ethnicity
Class and status
Sexuality
Physical ability /disability 

The Detective in Film noir is one of the main character which is very predictable character, he drinks, he smokes his age however NORMALLY is 40-50's. Its very uncommon to see young detective in Film noirs. The detective is wordly-wise. He knows what his talk about which gains him 'respect' or that what he thinks anyway. Really the detective is vulnerable, sly and patronising however this is because of the time period there wasn’t equality within genders so the detective often thought he was better than women which women (the Femme Fatale often uses this at her advantage) The detective shows this in the way which he speaks for example 'darling' and 'petel' which may come across as patronising for the women. Which in today's society this wouldn't acceptable because it would come across as 'creepy' ECT.


The detective in our Film Noir

Preliminary Task Analysis

For our preliminary task we had to film a series of shots based on a narrative we had been given. The narrative of this included two characters, the first one was the typical hero and the second being the generic villain. Our aims were to create a piece of film which followed the typical action film conventions whilst following continuity.

Our final product has some flaws but we had the general idea. If we were to do it again then we would change a few things. Including some continuity issues and music editing. The continuity issues are mainly with the dialogue as we followed the 180 degrees rule.

Overall we think our preliminary task was of good standard as we followed all instructions fully and met everything in the criteria allowing us to have a good quality final product.