2. Initial Idea The first piece we took inspiration from was the video “Na Na Na – My Chemical Romance” to us this represents the elements of Neo Noir we wish to include in our opening, the characters “Cobra Kid” and others all dress according to the one singular style of the set, which seems to be in Mexico, whilst we do not intend to dress quite like this, we do intend to imitate the uniformity of there dress code, and also how the camera shots are taken, many of them are fast and brief, often panning. This helps convey the action happening in the scene, and for our shot action sequence, we wish it to look similar to this.
3. Contemporary Noir Our second main inspiration was the contemporary Noir style of the film “LA Confidential” with its typical patriarchal characters, “Bent” characters, and black and white lines as to the good and bad. We decided emulating this would be a good starting point as to how we begin producing the film. We took elements of the introduction of this film, with a voice-over and hope to recreate it accurately. Created on quite a low budget it also holds hopes that it is not a big budget style that would be impossible to reproduce. This style of classic ocontemporary Noir is what we most hope to recreate, and is our main style of filming for this piece. However we did add in other elements as shown next.
4. Spirit We then took ideas from films such as “Spirit” and “Sin City” all of which use a grey scale background and were in fact green screened through the entire production. However as we are unable to replicate this we aim to show similar qualities to our film (Such as colour signification and “Colour as a weapon” – Robert Rodriguez; Director of Sin City) by using an editing program to grey out our colour scheme, much alike as to what is seen in “Twilight” and then highlight and add depth to some of the colours already present when they will signify something. Examples from Spirit (Left) and Sin City (Right)
5. “Se7en” Another influence we gained was through the introduction of “Se7en”. This film, whilst not contemporary or Neo noir like the other examples, is a horror. Whilst this is not our genre we still decided to take elements of clips and ideas from it. Such as the industrial noise of the introduction soundtrack “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails, whilst we cannot replicate this due to copyright reasons we hope to emulate it as best as possible through use of music programs such as Garage Band. The soundtrack provides the perfect tense overture to the introduction of the film, this effect is what we wish to reproduce. Also some of the ambient horror noise is quite useful to replicate in some of our more tense scenes. Above, Se7en DVD cover, Right, Nine Inch Nails “Only” single, cover.
6. “Taken “ Liam Neeson Whilst most of our drama elements were now idealised and we had a good picture of how we wanted to shoot, and edit our film, we still had to slightly develop some of the characters. The character Liam Neeson plays in “Taken” Bryan Mills is the perfect example of the character we want Bradley Hope to play as the protagonist. Mills plays an ex CIA operative, and is cold, dethatched, hard and sometimes scary. This makes him the perfect character to emulate for our film as it will help notch up the tension, and hopefully the acting skills will reproduce this well. Furthermore we could still take some elements of the “Thriller” from Taken, shots such as the phone call when his daughter is kidnapped is exactly how we wish to play out the first scene, giving a letter to Bradley. We would also like to recreate how this character looks, as shown, Right.
7. In Essence… We have taken elements from many genres, Noir, Neo Noir, Thriller, Horror e.t.c and hope to combine them with the bare essentials of contemporary Noir films to create a “Thriller Noir”, we have ideas as to how we wish to emulate these styles and hope we have the production skills in able to do so. David Leighton, Bradley Hope & Sophie Gilroy.
