Year 12 - Film Noir - Main Task Research

For our media production we have been set the task to film a 'Film Noir' production. The word film Noir is used to primarily describe stylish 'Hollywood Crime Dramas'. We based our production around the idea of a hollywood crime drama as we believed that this would typically follow the conventions of a Film Noir production.

• From Looking at sources all over the internet we decided to base our production on 'Gun Crazy', this production is a 1950 film noir feature film starring Peggy Cummins and John Dall. This production is a story about the crime spree of a gun toting husband.

• Although our production is not about a gun toting husband and wife. We wanted to follow along the lines of having a gang, who is being hunted down by a detective. These would typically follow conventional plot lines of a film noir production.

• From watching this clip, we found that typically we would need to have a femme fatale in our production, this is key in gaining control over the aspects of our film noir produciton. Although the femme fatale in this production is dressed up all glamoursly, we choose to do this, as in our production crystal is wearing a glamorous dress that makes her look elegant. Also from looking at this we found that all male characters must be wearing suits. So we based all our males characters to enlighten the conventions and to be seen on camera wearing a suit.

• From Looking at many images we found these images most helpful when looking for ideas in which to dress our characters and what props they would be using.

•  From these images you can clearly see that the males are all typically dressed in suits with a hat and trenchcoat on.
• From the images you can clearly see that the women are all dressed in elegant dresses.
• It would appear that a conventions that is critical to the production of film noir would be for the actors to be smoking, we used this convention to make sure that our production met the requirements.

Setting/Location:

• In order for our production to follow the crime genre, we thought it would be good if we used a bar area. We had all our characters sit round a booth, with the lead character 'tony' walking into to questions his fellow gang members what had happened with his 'precious drugs'. We found this to be key, as from looking at a wide range of sources it would appear to us that a bar setting would be the right setting.