Hello, and welcome to my AS Media blog! My name is Rebecca Fisher and I am a student at Suffolk New College. I am using this blog to track my progress and to display all my research as well as all the practical exercises I have encountered. This is a brief outlining of what I intend to do and what I am hoping to have created by the end of the year;
In groups of four, we will undertake a practical video project. It is our aim to produce a 2-3 minute film opening to a contemporary Film Noir thriller that will act as our coursework, demonstrating that I am able to understand the key concepts of media and am sufficiently able to use a range of technical skills. This piece of work should update the Noir genre to todays date, but still convey the same values, traditions, narrative, mood and conventions of classic Film Noir to suit a new audience in contemporary setting.
Each of us in the group will take on the responsibility for a certain element of our production but will still explore all the different roles and will plan how to excecute them. The roles include writer, director, producer, cinematographer, sound, art direction and editor. In order to deliver these responsibilities, there will be a lot of researching and planning which will help to establish what I am trying to accomplish and how I will create my opening sequences.
This production will enable me to show that I have the appropriate skills needed to construct a completed film opening sequence. After having finished this, I shall then evaluate my practical work using all of my media theory, particularly concentrating on the ares of this film that I was responsible for.
In order to gain practise for this film opening sequence, I will take up a Preliminary Exercise consisting of a short film scene that will help me to better understand the use of the camera and the effects I could possibly obtain from it from experience.
Though there is a lot of work involved in this project, I am really looking foward to hands on activities and hopefully my interest in all aspects of the mass media will show through my finished produce and those who watch my opening film sequence will enjoy what they see and get a real feeling for contemporary Film Noir.
As many of the jobs were left empty during the war, it was down to the women to take over their place in the workplace; the start of the reason why female characters in Noir are often conveyed as powerful and dangerous. This is because when the men came back from the war, the women who had been working did not want to go back to their household chores; they had found a new lease on life and continued working. Being a huge social lift, the men started to feel slightly threatened by these new strong liberated women. Once the war ended in 1946, these films flooded France all at once, causing French critic Nino Frank to realise that all these films had something in common; similar dark undertones with identical conventions. Since then, these films have their own genre of Noir.