Narrative Planning

We decided to base the plot around a love triangle as this is very stereotypical within Film Noirs, which meant we could still use our Neo Noir plot.
We decided to use the Tzvetan Todorov narrative which is very mainstream for film narratives, and it fits in well with the story line of our movie, Cinderella, however we have modernized it and changed it slightly. Our storyline hasn't been finalised yet however we know we want to use this narrative technique, which follows the structure below;
The characters are going to be the most obvious change to a typical Film Noir. We will have a Femme Fatal, Everyman and Girl next door, however the femme fatal is a Male and the Everyman is a female. We have decided to switch these gender roles to give our story a more modern and memorable aspect.

Lighting In Our Film

 At the start of the film, when Cinderella is happy and in a richer position, we are going to use a lot of bright colours and lighting. She will look very cheerful and colourful and her outfit will be very nice. Her Prince will also look nice.

As she continues on to get more and more involved in the drug scene, the colours will become more dull and moody. We will use less colours until eventually, we use almost no colour at all. This is used to represent her diminishing happiness as she gets nearer to killing herself.

Foleyed sounds from "Priests"

We watched a clip from the film "Priests" in silence and had to guess which noises we thought would be in the extract. After doing this, we watched the film with noise and filled in all of the noises that we missed. We were then set a task to recreate the sounds we heard by using foleying, a technique used by film makers to recreate noises externally and add them into films.

Mise En Scene Planning

This is our planning sheet for the Mise-En-Scene for our final production. We decided that the main prop used will be Cinderella's diary and as the extract progresses the pages will get more bloody and ruined. Cinderella will start with nice, expensive clothes and they will get continually worse as she goes on. The Prince wears smart, expensive clothes throughout and the drug-influencing character will wear a tracksuit. We will use dark lighting to create a dark and moody atmosphere. As the extract continues there will be more blood on the book until the end when it is covered because she has killed herself. We used the intro from "Se7en" as our main influence as we liked how they used props and lighting without using dialogue or any actors.

Cinderella: Slideshow - Skupina

This was the slideshow Niamh created to compile all of the photos we took whilst planning our film. She used a comic styled story board, and edited each of the photos in Photoshop. The locations we shot the photos in were changed when we filmed the final piece, and we also changed a few of the characters and modified the story line.

Cinderella - Review

Cinderella Evalution from Matthew Levesley on Vimeo.

This was the review of our production. In this video, we, as a group, address the difficulties we encountered and how we overcame them. We mention how on one day, we only had 1 of 5 members present, which made production levels very limited as there was limited resources, which was an unfortunate and unforeseen issue. One member was also absent for a 3 week period, meaning he was unavailable whenever we tried to film, so he found his work limited to only editing. We restarted our entire production quite late on in the process, which meant we hurried the planning and a lot of decisions were made on the spot as we had to work with what we had before us. This meant that a lot of scenes were not as well planned out as they should have been, with some mistakes and props being missing and costumes going wrong too. The party was difficult to film as we didn't have a free location out of school, but fortunately we found some willing friends to volunteer as we used the school studio. We also lost a number of scenes during the editing process in the late stages, which meant we had to try to make certain scenes make sense, but we couldn't make amends to all of them. We learnt from the task that the group as a whole are unable to work together, so we decided to split the group into a 2 and a 3 for future projects to ensure the highest level of production and standard of work. Generally, I believe we presented ourselves with the most problems as we didn't put enough effort into the planning, but I feel we showed how capable we are of the task by creating a decent final piece out of a difficult project, and we learnt all of our strengths and weaknesses before we got started on the final Film Noir project.