Kenya Bell

Question 1: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We researched things for the noir genre such as the characters, settings, themes, visual style, narrative and the progression of film noirs. We included characters such as gangsters, a detective and a main character that is a mix of detective, corrupt police and a protagonist. Our gangsters are Tony Pensiero (Show a clip of Tony in the video), Paulie (Show a clip of Paulie in the video) and Frankie (show a clip of Frankie in the video). Using these specific characters ensured that we followed the conventions of a noir film, as they are normally centred on gangs causing trouble in there nabour hoods.

A noir film is conventionally used to show the audience that the characters are stuck in the city where the gang is, and if someone stayed there too long they would eventually become a part of that city forever. We showed this in our media product through the story line and characters. The storyline shows the journey of one detective that starts to question if he is on the wrong side, and eventually makes his decision after the gang had shown him the way things could be run from the other side (After this put on the scene where Hudson shoots Tony). The way we showed this convention of feeling trapped through the characters was by making the characters i.e. Tony get the detective involved very early on the job (Show the scene where Tony is talking about Hudson to the other two gang members) As you just hear on the video Tony said ‘new’ meaning that the characters don’t even need to be trusted to be able to join in on the gangs operations.

Being the main characters it has a lot of roles such as being the detective, corrupt cop and a protagonist. Having one character with a lot of roles develops the conventions, because this one character will now become the main focus of the audience and they will involve themselves more in our film to make sure in the end they understand this character Dominic Hudson. (Show a still image of Dominic Hudson)

Conventionally dark alleys, bars/lounges, police stations, and empty streets are used in noir films and we achieved using some of these in our opening sequence. The settings we chose to use where an office, a living room and a street which is located close to brink burn. The office was the police station in the opening sequence (Show a clip from the office scene), we used an empty street for the murder scene (Show a clip of the murder scene) and we also used a lounge which included a lot of conventions in its self. (Show a clip of the gang scene)As you can see in the video there is a pool table like there would be in a high gang members house, this is a strong use of the convention because it makes the noir film look like it is set in the 1950’s.

Making sure we had the right location for our filming I went out to different locations and took photos. (Show the images of the locations I took) After me and Mathew talked about it we decided there locations did not have the right mise en scene for a noir film. We chose to stick to the conventions of noir looking places to make sure the audience believed it was filmed in the 1950’s.

The opening sequence we created uses a couple of conventional themes but they challenge the way they are usually used. The themes we used where murder, betrayal and jealousy. Again we challenged the conventions by making one character use all of these on his own. Normally feelings like jealousy and betrayal are portrayed from different characters however we have challenged this and made only one character feel all these emotions making Dominic more edgy and an interesting character.

There are different types of narrative such as flashbacks, voiceover narration, first person narrative and flash forward narrative. We decided to use a mixture of the narrative conventions such as flashbacks, a first person narrative and a voiceover narration. We used all of these in our opening sequence to make the film seem interesting and intrigue the audience into the film with little glimpses into the past.

Me and Mathew both researched different institutions to make sure we had a wide understanding of who was most likely to produce our noir film, Snake in the Grass (Show the

Kenya Bell

image of the title). I did this by taking a wide variety of noir films from different points in time, and picking a couple to see who produced them and how much money the film made. I chose Warner Bros as a conclusion although Mathews researched showed that paramount pictures, was the produces that produced more Noir film so we chose paramount pictures.

Me and Mathew both looked at two different opening sequences each, which meant that we could chose a variety of conventions to bring back and use in our film. One of the conventions I found was a flash forward, this was in the film opening Bugsy Malone. (Show a clip off the opening sequence of Bugsy Malone in our video) We decided that using a conventional flashback would give our noir film a nice smooth feel, giving the audience just enough glimpses into what is to come during the rest of the film. (Show a flashback from our opening sequence)

I also looked at Sunset Blvd’s opening sequence. The title order for this film are different from the modern conventions of titles. I didn’t chose to use the conventional title sequence like shown in Sunset Blvd, because in now day it would bore the audience and they would not find our opening sequence interesting and therefore will not watch our film. (Show an example from the film with the titles all shown at once on a black screen) Not following the titles convention will make our noir sequence modern and more watchable.

I liked the convention where the film Sunset Blvd showed the murder victim in the opening sequence. We incorporated this into our opening sequence by showing Tony Pensiero lying dead on the floor at the end of the sequence. (Show the clip where Tony is laid dead on the floor) We used this convention because it intrigues the audience and makes them question why Tony got murdered? What will happen to the rest of the gang? What happened the operation they were on? This will make them want to watch the rest of the film to be able to find out answers.

Mathew watched the opening sequence for James Bond Casino Royale and this opening sequence was focused around gambling and private meeting rooms. To follow this convention we decided to include a private room in our opening sequence. And this opening sequence also lets the audience know what type of character this person is. (Show a clip with the gang hide out on)

(Show the titles time lines when we are speaking during the video) For further research we needed to find out the chronological order that the titles should appear on our opening sequence. We did this by looking at two different opening sequences. I looked at Natural Born Killers and Mathew looked at James Bond Casino Royale’s opening sequence. This allowed us to see how long the titles should stay visible on the screen, and which order they should go. To make sure we followed conventions we used their orders of titles. Although we did challenge one title convention by putting the name of our film at the end of the sequence. We chose this order so that the title of our film was remembered in the audiences mind right at the end of the film.

I created a survey, which was given out to a wide variety of people, so that we could find out what they would expect to see in our film. However doing this showed us that 90.9% of the peopled surveyed knew nothing about the noir genre or the conventions it normally follow.

Even though the audience didn’t know as much about the noir genre, they still liked some of the conventions that are usually found in noir films. This was things such as plot twists which are a huge convention of noir. We made sure we used this convention in our film because 70% of the audience liked a plot twist, therefore using this convention will give us a bigger audience. An example of how we used a plot twist is when the detective murdered Tony Pensiero (On the video play the murder scene while one of us is speaking this paragraph)

After finding out this we decided that we should stick as closely as we could to the noir conventions. An example of this would be when we picked the names for our characters such as Tony Pensiero, Paulie, and Dominic Hudson (In the video show clips of the characters saying the names)

Kenya Bell

However we did challenge some conventions of noir. These where things such as not including some conventional characters like the Femme Fatale. We made this decision so that our audience focused more on the storyline of the one main character Dominic Hudson, rather than focusing on a romance that would distract the character and the audience.

Also we pushed the boundaries for the narrative of the story, because in our opening sequence we create a narrative where the character is letting the audience in on all the secrets by directly talking to them. This is challenging conventions because we have broken the 4 th wall between the characters and the audience. (On the video show the scene where Dominic looks at the camera towards the audience)