Film Noir Evaluation

Film Noir Evaluation.

The class was separated into 3 teams of 6 and then we started the pre-planning, we each came up with different things that we could use, Jack created character names, I made characters, character names, a story and location ideas, Danny & Kyle together came up with character types and a story, Owen came up with a story and Lawrence came up with shot ideas and locations to use for the movie.

We decided to combined Owen, Danny & Kyle’s stories together to make a full movie story with sub-plots, we used Jack’s names but tweaked them a little and used Lawrence’s ideas for locations and shot types with all my ideas being kept for my final project movie advertising.

I wrote the character bios while the others did their roles but we had a lot of problems during pre-production, Kyle and Danny often went off to work alone without telling the rest of us what they were doing so we ended up with 2 people doing a script and Danny sometimes came in late or not at all. Jack sometimes talked over others or ignored their ideas.

Danny was writing the script but he stopped coming in for entire days so I wrote a script quickly making us catch up although I could have done better with more time it was still good enough to use as a story.

In the end we had the characters, a detective, 2 hitmen, some heist members and a femme fatale crime boss but we had no actor to play the femme fatale so we started recording scenes that she was not in.

Some lines in the film were made up on the spot either because there were no lines or because there version turned out better than the original.

Our location for the bar was unable to be gained so we changed it and that worked out well.

Some of the films plot was altered to either be better or save time that we were running out, it didn’t help that Kyle and Danny sometimes stopped recording earlier in the afternoon instead of continuing for longer.

The detective was originally going to be a vigilante because he was fired and decided to take the law into his own hands but he was changed to become corrupt during the end, the femme fatale’s on-screen time was also cut to save time as we still didn’t have an actor.

We have some bloopers because of laughing and a few mistakes but they were fun to record and the plot still managed to make sense. We eventually got a femme fatale thanks to Brittany and the rest of her group also appeared as extras in the bar scene, Craig also appeared as the guy who is killed in the intro and Justin is the bar tender.

The editing was a team effort between Danny, Lawrence and Jack with Lawrence and Jack doing the basics and Danny adding effects and music, the end product of the film had a few editing flaws though, the music was too loud or too quiet and didn’t match the movie that well as Danny didn’t really choose matching music and didn’t tell anyone what music he was using.

My lines were too quiet because of how quiet I am, the punching sound effects were funny though so we decided to keep them, Danny also removed all the narration that would have explained the characters leaving the pre-cinema showing audience confused as to who everyone was and also removed the detective scene and replacing it with text making nobody know who the detective is and also not knowing who the random character I play is when he appears in the scene.

A continuity error that appears multiple times is that Owen and Jack’s characters appear without their hats in-between scenes and then the hats reappear, but we had a version of Jack’s scene with his hat that was not used and we filmed a scene of Owen putting his hat down to explain the continuity error but they were both not used by the editor for some reason?

The ending where the survivor is arrested and everyone else is dead worked well and the locations and filming went well and despite the short 2 hours of script writing I was ok with the finished story, if I was good at editing I would make a few differences such as adding the detective scene, altering the sound effects and replacing the music altogether.

There was a scene idea that was never filmed and was also forgotten about where Danny the heist member and Kyle the hitman bump into each other in the street before the main conflict to show Danny’s darkness and also make them know each other during the final confrontation but time constraints and the fact that it was not very important it was never filmed. The intro where Danny kills a former teammate friend shows his dark nature well anyway.

All of the narration was made up on the spot by me and the characters actor that was recording it, each one was the character describing there origins, life and shows what kind of person they are.

Since I wrote the characters I came up with their personalities. The characters personalities are written in their character bios although during filming Lawrence’s character was made to be clumsy due to many funny moments such as stuttering on his lines, getting his foot stuck on the blinds of the window his hitman character was climbing through and failing to close the door properly when hiding.

My final project where I advertise this film is planned to be a story that ties into the film through references, an example is the news will be talking about the movie’s plot aftermath and the surviving characters will appear in the story, I will also make character profiles of the characters from the tie-in story.