Question 1 Draft

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

We have quite a few conventions of film noirs in our film but we have also went out for our noir to be unique but have enough conventions to show that our film is a noir just a little different. Film Noir’s were most popular in the years of 1940s and 50s when film and television were in black and white and as we wanted our film to be a classic noir rather than a neo noir, we when editing made our film black and white to add to the classic ways of film noirs. In many film noirs, someone is murdered in the opening sequence which we were sure to follow suit to, for example in the film Destination murder in which an old man is killed with a gun and in our film Donald is murdered in the opening scene. Guns are the most conventional weapons in film noirs but we went against conventions and used a big heavy rock, as we did not have a gun available so we used what was available in the mise en scene. Due to the time periods of film noirs the music tends to be quite jazzy and in our opening scene we used some jazzy music to follow along with the conventions and to set the scene of the films genre. Typical costumes worn in film noirs are fedora hats and suits, we followed this to some extent as in the interview scene our detective is wearing a fedora that we obtained from the college, we could not get our hands on a suit that was nt a prom suit so we tried our best with a shirt and trousers. Trench coats are big in film noirs and we managed to get some for two of our actors so we followed the conventions of costume pretty well apart from the character Rex who wore pretty modern clothing, which was a definite fault. In our opening scene we did not introduce the femme fatale as the femme fatale more as the killer who later would have been discovered to be the femme fatale and the audience not knowing she was the killer at the beginning, this fits into the conventions that the femme fatale is the killer/bad guy but is not shown as the femme fatale so our film did not fit into the conventions. Flashbacks are a very conventional in film noirs for example in the film The Walking Hills a flashback is used to show what had happened when a game of poker got violent and one of them ended up dead, in our film a flash back is used to show and argument over the treatment of Donalds wife which turns violent and we find out that Donald has ended up dead. The setting of our film is supposed to be an alleyway type scene as it conventional for film noirs for scenes to be set in alleyways but we could not find a alleyway so we had to make do with the back of the cinema which looks a bit like an alley way so we followed the conventions to some extent and it looks quite believable that it is what it is supposed to be.