OUR OTS: THE VULNERABLE

Evaluation

rachel savage AS media evaluation; Film Noir 2012 on Prezi

Talking about our target audience

Feedback

We presented our film noir to three students, two of whom are in our class, and received their feedback (we made sure to get at least one male opinion since he was a part of our target audience). The feedback in the areas of the titles, costumes, story line, transitions, sound, and use of the camera were positive but all of the comments mentioned the unsteadiness of the camera in certain points of our OTS. We did use a tripod but the unsteadiness came from when we tried to tilt and pan. The movements were not smooth enough and occasionally jolted slightly. 

23/4/12

Today was basically finishing editing our OTS and expanding my evaluation, we did actually manage to complete our OTS and overall I am really pleased with how it turned out. Me and Katherine also made a video answering one of the evaluation questions 'Who would be the audience for your media product?' We both felt like this was the best question to answer as we felt this was the question we knew least about and had less information on. This will be included in our evaluations. Also we asked the other students in our class and not from our class to watch our OTS and give us feedback on our sheet with multiple questions that will be uploaded this week.

The deadline for our blogs is on Wednesday the 25th of April.

Youtube documentaries

 

I searched online and found this documentary from 1992 talking about the history and generic conventions that make a film noir.

Nine frame structure analysis of a film opening

I found the full film 'Kiss Me Deadly' from 1955 online, because our OTS is meant to be 2 minutes long I decided to look at the first 2 minutes of this film noir and analyse screen shots that I take.

Right at the beginning of this noir the company credits 'United Artists' appears with grand music, already just from this title you can tell it's going to be a black and white film.

Straight after the titles finish the screen goes black, woman's legs start to run across the screen with heavy breathing as the black slowly fades into a road. Already you start to wonder, who is this woman? Why is she running? Where is she?

The camera then quickly shows a shot of the woman's face, from this we have to assume that she is the femme fatale. However still not answering our questions but adding more tension and mystery.

The camera then shows the woman that we can only guess as the femme fatale from a extra long shot (ELS). This shows us where she is but still not answering how she got there or why she's running.

As she proceeds to run the shot then skips to a extra long shot of a car heading in the other direction toward the woman. This adds further questions, why is there a car in the middle of nowhere? Who is driving it? The woman stands in front of the car forcing it to stop and swerve in to the side of the road, the woman then approaches the car.

After the woman approaches the car the camera shows a close up of the man sitting in the car, we can only assume that he is now the anti hero of the story due to the way he's dressed, the smart car he drives and his sly attitude towards the woman.

 An over the shoulder shot is used to show who the femme fatale is talking to, and the anti hero's reactions that what she has to say, however due to being out of breath all the femme fatale can do is pant heavily. He has no choice but to say "Get in."

As the femme fatale walks around and enters the car a narration is played over the top with the woman's voice, unfortunately due to the films age and quality of the video I'm unable to figure out what is she's saying.

The last scene of the 2 minutes shows the opening credits, the camera shows a point of view shot where it feels like we are looking out from the front window screen. The credits slowly appear from the top of the screen and don't stop until they disappear in a calm movement, you notice that on the screen shot the writing is backwards, this is because the writing is coming down and so we read the bottom words first. Even though this OTS was quit dramatic in we had no idea what was going on, we think that the woman is now safe with this man and so there is less tension.

I really like this OTS, because we have no idea why the femme fatale was in the middle of nowhere or why she had no shoes etc, and from this point on the story can be unravelled with flashbacks and stories creating us on edge throughout the film noir due to the leaving us in suspense at the beginning.

                                               (The full movie 'Kiss Me Deadly' from 1955)

Katherine's post about 'The Sound Within Our OTS'

http://katherinewarnes.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/sound-within-our-ots.html

Storyboard Animatic

Editing problems

Katherine spent an afternoon re-fixing and re-editing the OTS, another problem then arose when she tried to save what she had done. It was not allowing the OTS to save because it 'did not have permission' and then the program  proceeded to suddenly close down, causing all the work she'd just completed to be erased. 

After a few days the problem has finally been sorted and we now have to rush to do what should have been done a week ago.

Here is an animated example of a film noir, it has key aspects of a noir but is not conventional.
The main difference of this to a conventional noir is that this is animated, however it still has film noir characteristics. The main character is a detective, however this clip shows him in a humorous way whereas a traditional film noir wouldn't. The majority of scenes are very dark with little lighting, however it's not black and white. At the end of the clip the old woman and detective are sitting around a circle table, there is a light shinning on the top which reminds me of a poker table that could be used in a film noir. The narrative of this short film is about crime but the twist is that the crime is in the detectives imagination, this could be used in a noir but without it being humorous.
 Unlike this short clip we'd plan for our film noir to be more traditional.

OTS Planning

• Frame one - Shot focuses on the corner of a table where you see a pool of blood, slowly dripping down.
• Frame two - The shot then cuts to the lower leg of the table where we can see a puddle of blood that has been formed by the droplets. In the background an arm is seen laying across the floor.
• Frame three - From a low angle, the corpse's body is shown. A woman in heels steps over it.
• Frame four - The corpse is lying in the corner of the frame while the centered woman walks towards an open door, pulling her coat off a chair in the process. The light from the doorway creates bold silhouettes.
• Frame five - A side profile of the woman is seen. The camera tracks her from that angle while she walks along a brick wall at night. Her breath can be seen against the cold weather.
• Frame six - A low angle shot of the woman walking down the street from behind. Only her shoes are visible but in the background the feet of someone can be seen standing under a street lamp.
• Frame seven - Side profile as the woman approaches the man (who has a clearly larger build than her), hugging him. 
• Frame eight - During the hug, the man slowly pulls out a knife from his sleeve and that is where it ends.

Most cenes will be set at night, we will edit the lighting to be very dark and the objects in this opening title sequence will only just be visible through the heavy contrasting. We aim to quickly build up tension in our 'OTS' which will be the only thing that is unlike usual film noirs since they tend to be more slow-paced. 

Language

In our film noir we wanted to find the best font for our OTS, at the moment the typography we have is 'Times New Roman' with the style 'Typewriter'. However it doesn't match that of what would be in a real film noir, the letters slowly get typed on the screen rather then quick and dramatic even though in our opening the scenes are quick with each scene being dramatic (eg showing the corpse and blood soaked hands) Each of our names  appear over two scenes,  however only mine, Katherine's and Kristy's names are in the OTS we've yet to add the actors that were involved. We also noticed that the recent text that we added for our names wasn't the same as the text in the middle of our OTS to show time passing.
To fix these problems we first decided to change the typography, but in doing that we came across a problem, the typography we originally picked would still appear even after applying the new typography (Apple Li Gothic medium) , even after asking the teacher we still couldn't figure out the problem. The other problem we found that instead of having the motion 'Typwriter' where the our names came on screen slowly the movement 'Wipe' was chosen. Though we still couldn't use this because the original font that wasn't wanted would still appear.

I did research in fonts and attempted to find different examples used in film noirs, and through looking found this opening from a film noir called 'Crime Wave' from 1954.

 The writing  in the OTS of this film is similar to ours at the moment, the writing is bold and plain white. The writing appears slowly while still being in sync with the background music. However the difference between our OTS and this OTS, is that in this the opening is only of a car driving along and so there isn't any tension building. Whereas ours involves quick sharp scenes with a dramatic story, and so to go with our OTS we will need titles that appear quickly to contribute to tension building.

Production meeting 16/4/12

Today we were finishing editing. Kirsty will look at whether our ots works as a title sequence well with the general conventions etc..I will be writing about the language for our ots and Katherine is looking at the sound, as it would be easier if she is creating the piano piece for our ots.
This was because we found that our OTS really didn't need that much editing or work, that we could only think of small jobs. However we did notice a few things that could be improved like clips were too long or scenes needed to be darker to fit in with the rest of the scenes, which all got fixed during the lesson.