Hello, Anthony here, welcome back! For almost a month, I have spent days researching and planning for my brief. In this post I will be restating in detail many elements relating to my brief, such as its audience, potential social issues, and why I chose the subgenre I did.
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Before all my work began, I had worked on two different assignments in class, geared towards both the film opening or magazine cover. When it came time to decide my brief, I already had the film opening in mind. Despite the fact that I am, for the most part, working alone, I still felt like I could manage to create something of high quality with my friends in the long run.
Following this brief decision, I immediately delve into three different genres (comedy, crime, and mystery), I decided to go with the latter, as I had not received much exposure to the genre as a whole up to that point. Within the post in which I made this decision, I included brief descriptions of some of mystery's most notable subgenres, but instead of choosing one of those to further make my brief about, I continued conducting research on mystery as a whole, until I went back and realized that it would be in my benefit to make the brief fall into a subgenre. It was here where my fondness for classic black-and-white films guided me into choosing noir as my subgenre of choice.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I had done some previous research seeing who my opening's genre would appeal to prior to sticking to the noir subgenre. I would like to take this opportunity to research deeper into the target audience of noir specifically, considering what I found for mystery was generally weak on its own.
This time I will be revising this prior research to see if I can find any new information, considering the age and gender of the audience once more. Like previous research attempts, it was difficult to find concrete evidence, so I will be basing the target audience off of timely relevance and other features of the subgenre.
One convention that I did not utilize when planning the narrative and plot is the feme fatale, a character archetype depicting a mysterious, seductive, and often beautiful woman who exploits men, and are sometimes the prime antagonists of a noir plot. The beauty factor of these characters were primarily tailored for male audiences, as proven by past analytical data conducted on mystery film viewership in total.
A previous example used in one of my earlier blog posts, though not relating to film noir specifically, it shows hot mystery is still overall preferred by men. Source: PubMed Central
As for the age range of my potential audience, I originally concluded that they were, on average, about 24 years old. However, considering that the genre originated in the 1940's-50's and only saw a considerable resurgence in the 1970's with a few known productions, this range can extend into the 40's and 50's. Though this new conclusion is unsupported, it could be generally deduced that noir films are meant to target an adult audience.
Companies such as Warner Brothers, MGM, and Paramount were well known for producing noir and gangster films back in their prime. Most of the time noir films were put in low budgets, but some of the first, such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Murder, My Sweet (1944), were put in production budgets of $1,000,000 and more. Processing black and white films were much more cheap, thus the classic black and white convention noir films are known for.
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A prominent social issue hinted throughout the opening is urban alienation. This is shown primarily through the protagonist of my brief is going to be psychologically distressed to some capacity, as well as the city setting itself. Mise-en-scene elements like low-key and high contrast lighting, props, and the protagonist's posture/movement will reflect their mental state.
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I am set on using I-Movie to edit the opening, I am mostly familiar with all its basic editing features as well as importing music to a project. One thing I would have to learn to meet one of the opening's biggest conventions is how to add and edit text, as well as making a shadow effect for the test as is seen with most noir title designs.
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My plan for producing the brief is set into different chunks. What I want to complete first before the production process is doing some more planning, because I believe it is in my interest to arrange a storyboard, filming location, and cast. I would like to make a practice short film similar to film noir to practice and get the style done, as well. Filming should take at most 2 days, and I would like the rest of my time to be spent editing and working on this blog.
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Sources used for information:
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Thank you for reading my project proposal, I hope that what I wrote was detailed enough to give you an idea of what I want my film to be like, how I complete it, and who and what it is made for. Next time, I will continue the planning process, have a good one!
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