post 11- film style and film noir

When we were looking at creating our short film a question that did arise was what style would we apply to our film and how. Our class looked at different ways to create a style, for example altering the lighting to a certain way creates a style of its own. This lead to film noir, a sytlistic talent and iconic style.

Film Noir basically means black film/ cinema and was first applied by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946. It was used to describe the dark, downbeat and black looks and themes in many of the American crime and thriller films of the 1940's up to the late 60's. It apparently reflected the mood and tensions of a post world war / cold war America. It reflected the fear, despair, mistrust and paranoia. It became particularly synomous with stylish American crime dramas that explored cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Some famous examples include Double Indemnity, Femme Fatale and Psycho.

The films themselves revolve around heroes, who are flawed and cause you to question their actions. These characters where often described by critics as aliented from society. There are certain stereotypes that were portrayed such as the hard boiled detective, corrupt policeman and femme fatales amongst many others. The most intriging characters seemed to be the femme fatales with thier seductive charm, beauty and double dealing actions.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn-RWYZYbsY&feature=player_embedded
This is a clip from from Double Indemnity. It shows how film noir uses lighting to manipulate the mood of the scene and to illuminate the woman's seductiveness. After watching this clip we were then taught how to arrange the lights and how to use this skill to create a film noir style. We then learnt about the different shadows that you can make from manipulating the light.
There is the attached shadow. This is where a shadow directly defines a form. As you can see in the image on the right, the person is standing in front of the source of light and the shadow is attached to the perosn and is a reflective form of that person.


The second is cast shadow. This is when the object blocks the light, normally the object is right by the source, and causes a shadow to be cast. As you can see on the image on the left the ball is blocking the source of light, causing a shadow to be formed or cast.

If you look to the at the image from the film Psycho we can not see the mans face. This was cleverly done by positioning the light source away from the actor. This helps create a shadow and keep him dark and mysterious. This is one of the advantages with film noir. It allows you to create a mood without using special effects, distract the audience or hide a characters identity. All of these things can be achieved by adjusting the lights.

After learning and understanding about film noir and how it can create a sense of style for our film we looked at how it looks on textures and objects. We then moved onto applying this knowledge to the practical side of things. Firstly however we looked at a previous practical demonstration which used a lemon.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-nBjFze-J4
In that video we can see that depending on where the light is and the intensity of light, it can give off a varied impression of the lemon.

We were then told to experiment with our own object which was a skull.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MrsShipp100#p/search/0/SNQefCdWxnY
We were given a torch, a black sheet of paper to use in the background, a camera and our skull. As we moved the torch around the skull we got different textures and shadows, all depending on where and how close we put the torch to the skull.