Tuesday, 29 June 2010

Development 2

to develop me photo even further I decided to add another common convention of the noir genre. I decided to try and digitally add in the venetian blinds shadows without having to retake the picture. To do this I put my image into photoshop and selected the line tool. I then set the line tool to black and at about 40% opacity. I then drew lines across the image to represent shadows from a venetian blind. I then used the blur, eraser and smudge tools to create a more realistic, smooth looking effect rather than the sharp lines created by just using the line tool.

this is my final result:


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FIlm noir development

I went with the common convention of circling cigarette smoke in my development. To create image I took a picture of a cigarette in an ash tray with smoke coming off of it. i then went into photoshop and turned the saturation right down to get a black and white image. I then adjusted the brightness/contrast and shadows/highlights to get a better looking image overall that looked like it belonged to the noir genre.



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Film Noir

Film Noir is a term used to describe the stylish Hollywood crime dramas, particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. Film Noir is generally regarded as stretching from the early 1940s to the late 1950s. Film Noir of this era is associated with a low-key black-and-white visual style.
Film Noir is known for its use of:
  • Dutch angles.
  • wide angle lenses.
  • low-key lighting.
  • night-for-night shooting. (rather than normal day-for-night shooting using filters)
  • location shooting.(rather than on a set, usually in an urban environment)
Common conventions of Film Noir include:
  • Flashbacks.
  • Use of shadows. ( like bars of shadow across the frame, e.g. venetian blinds)
  • Femme fatals. ( usually killed off at the end of the film)
  • First person narrations.
  • Rare to have a happy or optimistic ending.
  • Twisting storyline.
  • Circling cigarette smoke.
Common themes:
  • Revolve around heroes that are morally flawed and more questionable than normal heroes.
  • Corruption
  • Hero falls victim to temptation
  • People being famed for crimes
Film Noir uses dark, twisting storylines, use of lighting and location shooting to make the film as realistic, dark and gripping as possible, the films tend to have a sad ending as the characters are usually killed off.

Examples of Film Noir:
  • Sunset Blvd (1950)
  • Cast a Dark Shadow (1955)
  • Suspicion (1941)

  • Gilda (1946)
For more examples of Film Noir visit: http://www.imdb.com/genre/film_noir

German Expressionism

The first Expressionist films, The Student of Prague, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Golem Destiny (1921), Nosferatu (1922), Phantom (1922), Schatten (1923), and The Last Laugh (1920), (1924), were regarded as highly symbolic and stylized.

Various European cultures of the 1920s had embraced a willingness to look to the future by experimenting with bold, new ideas and artistic styles. The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by using set designs with incredibly non-realistic, absurd sets, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal, and other "intellectual" topics (as opposed to standard action-adventure and romantic films). Later films often categorized as part of the brief history of German Expressionism include Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), both directed by Fritz Lang.

The extreme non-realism of Expressionism was short-lived, fading away after only a few years. However, the themes of Expressionism were integrated into later films of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in an artistic control over the placement of scenery, light, etc. to enhance the mood of a film. This dark, moody school of film making was brought to America when the Nazis gained power and a number of German filmmakers emigrated to Hollywood. These German directors found American movie studios willing to embrace them, and several German directors and cameramen flourished there, producing a large amount of Hollywood films that had a profound effect on film as a whole.

Two genres that were especially influenced by Expressionism are horror film and film noir. Carl Laemmle and Universal Studios had made a name for themselves by producing such famous horror films of the silent era as Lon Chaney's 'The Phantom of the Opera'. German filmmakers such as Karl Freund (the cinematographer for Dracula in 1931) set the style and mood of the Universal monster movies of the 1930s with their dark and artistically designed sets, providing a model for later generations of horror films. Directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Carol Reed and Michael Curtiz introduced the Expressionist style to crime dramas of the 1940s, expanding Expressionism's influence on modern film making.

 (left: Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920, Robert Wiene)