Filmmaking 101 - Bootcamp Section 2

Film Noir

Our brief was to create a short film in the style of a film noir and it wasn't allowed to have any dialogue. Over a weekend we all went home and researched what a film Noir is, we found out that it is a black and white movie and it is often set around gangsta's. After this we brainstormed different ideas of what our story could be about. Our idea was a hit man who lost his wife now and his next target was a friend. Once we had a story we wrote a storyboard. The storyboards were crucial because we had no dialogue to tell the story. We had our story set out and we began filming. Kai was the main camera man and Sam directed the film, and me and James acted in the film. Me and Sam also edited the film. We all had a good input with the movie and we all expressed our different ideas. We had to get a realistic bullet wound so we asked makeup if they could help us. We first filmed all the shots we needed without makeup and over lunch James got the makeup done and we began filming again. We tried to get different shots so we got some shots whilst Kai is on the bridge filming us.



We then needed and actress so we had to get one in and we also needed to film in a bar. One of our issues was we had to work around the actresses time and we had to work around when we were allowed in the restaurant. We got around this problem by coming in early and filming with the actress. One of my favorite shots is the wide shot of me following James, I really like this shot because it is different and it adds to the tension of our short film. However we had major problem when rendering and exporting the film. This is because someone replaced our footage with different footage because the footage had the same name. This meant we lost a lot of our footage for our final scene. The footage is in the bar scene we lost a lot of the over the shoulder shots when my character is talking to James character in the bar. This meant we had to do a full wide shot of James giving the ring back to me. Furthermore when I get the target piece of paper we lost a lot of the footage so it looks very jumpy when I get the the note. This is a good learning point for our group because it taught us that we should re-name all of our footage when putting it on the computer so we don't have this problem again.

Western Fight Scene

Our brief was to create a fight scene in the style of a western. We went home and looked at western fight scenes, we looked at movies like 'The Good the Bad and the Ugly' and 'Django'. We understood that most western fight scenes had a very slow build up to build tension, in a western fight scene there are a lot of extreme close ups, close up of the hand and wide shots of the face off, so we used this idea in our fight scene. Me and Sam wrote a storyboard for the western and we found a location. A problem we had with the location was that it was always very busy. However we fixed this problem by having a contingency date to re-film the western. To make sure we finished on the deadline date we came in early on Monday 7th October to get all the western filmed. We found a good location out of the public's way. Another problem we had is that we did not have the costume or the props to make it look like a real western. So instead we decided to do a modern day western and in the same style as a western fight scene. 

After we got all the footage we began to edit the western. When editing we had to find some good and interesting western music to fit with the fight scene. This is because the music is one of the most important parts when filming a western fight scene. We also learnt how to do rolling credits for our film, this makes our film more professional. One of the best shots we filmed in the western was the extreme close ups because it allowed us to build tension with the music. Another one of my favourite shots was the wide shot of the stand off with the tree dividing me and Sam. I was the director and actor in this fight scene. Kai and James was the camera man and Sam was the actor.