I really enjoyed working on this production with the class. I feel like I personally learned a lot about the work it takes in film production; like directing, filming, creating the screenplay, and I wish I learned more in editing the final product. Sadly I had a conflicting schedule with our filming schedule so I feel I didn’t learn as much as I could have, however I did try my best to help with the film when I could. This experience has made me really want to learn more about the film industry and process.
I really think the final product turned out as good as it could have, given the extent of our abilities and access to the proper facilities. Examples of this include; lighting. Overall the lighting was consistent except in a specific sequence where Julia comes to Brian’s apartment, in which the back-to-back shots went from dark to light and back to dark. To be more specific, the shot where Brian opens his wine, pours it into a glass, takes his first sip and hears a knock at the door is all shot with very dark lighting. It is easy to note how dark it was because as he walks out of shot and it cuts to the next shot of him answering the door, the lighting from inside is obviously way lighter, and the lighting (darker than inside but still not as dark as the previous shot) from outside makes the shot even more confusing. Then we cut back to very dark lighting, the couch scene where Julia sits first and motions for Brian to sit with her.
This was not beneficial in the film because it confuses the audience where it’s supposed to be easy for them to piece together where the characters are and focus on what they’re talking about, not the difference in lighting. We really took into account what Tellote, Altman, Place and Peterson had to say about the characteristics of the genre. Place and Peterson define key lighting as, “the key light is the primary source of illumination, directed on the character usually from high and to one side of the camera. The key is generally a hard direct light that produces sharply defined shadows.” The lighting other than that, and the lab scene, was cleverly decided to keep dark with very low-key lighting in order to create an eerie mood to the film that is often connected to noir films. The style is also recreated here through our use of flashback and voiceover. Tellote defines narration as “a voice in present time introduces and then comments on a scene from the past, so that we see as if through the narrator’s mind’s eye”.
These two techniques are consistently used in classic noir film, in order to further develop characters’ individual storylines as well as develop the plot as a whole. Based on this we decided to use the combination with flashback and voiceover in the beginning of the film because we wanted to make it clear to the audience that something bad was going to happen, and that this character that is shown, is narrating it to the audience.
We’ve been discussing lately over the argument of whether noir is in fact a genre or if it’s simply just a style.
