Editing Suite; Using Final Cut



In this shot, we were using the video filters, namely the colour corrector, to turn down the saturation, fiddle with the blacks and whites, to get the film into black and white. Although this is't  convention as such of film noir, mostly because they were made during the 1940s and 50s when colour was just coming into films, it still seen as a hallmark of film noir.




Here I took a screen grab of the way in which we used effects on Final Cut; we played around with the speed, to address conventions of Neo Noir films, which use slow-motion and fast-forward a lot 



Screenshots for our film opening

We kept our title's fairly conventional within the undrstanding of FIlm Noir - plain white font, big but not imposing



The detective is in the foreground of this, with the telephone just behind him. This places it as an object of focus, wihtout drawing away attention to the protagonist.




A low angled shot gives the protagonist power and control throughout the scene



Props

 As film noir specifically comes from 1940s and 50s films, we decided to use a telephone that looked like it heralded from that era. Thi was also because of our attempt to create surrelism in the style of neo noir

This has the aesthetic appeal of a typical etective's trench coat, similar to Humphrey Bogart's iconic image, wearing a long trench coat and fedora

Feedback

Today we were given feedback, a form of audience response, on what was good and how to improve what wasn't as good. We heard pretty much what we were expecting to hear. Firstly, the sequence is too long; it's meant to be around 02.00 and ours was closer to 03.55. Not good really. We felt that this was where our opening was weakest, in its structure, and so we made use of the cross-fade on Final Cut to edit out a lot of footage and make it look like time is passing more quickly. It actually works better like this, giving it a much faster pace and a more stylistic, noir feeling (Film noir is, after all, a style, not a genre. A style that has formed it's own sub-group of films perhaps). Secondly, we were told to remove some of the dark saturation from some frames, as they needed to be a little bit lighter. This was fairly simple and required a few minutes in the editing suite, using the colour corrector to change the black's and white's in the video.