Initial story planning

Today, we decided who we were going to be working with and creating our final production with. I chose to work with Max as he seemed focused and capable and I believe that we work well together. The problem I thought we were going to encounter is his lack of media experience but it has yet to hinder us. He seems to be the driving force in terms of narrative and the storyline he has proposed is a really solid plot. We have made changes to weaker points in the plot to make it fit better with the noir theme but I really like the idea of the proposed plot as I think that we can experiment with lighting and produce a great looking piece.

The initial proposed storyline. We have added places for credits to go and changed minor details.

We then decided to plan the shots in the form of a condensed, brief storyboard. This was to get the narrative plot in our heads and to start to visualise the piece. Also, we got a better idea of how the shots would fit with one another and we could build upon our ideas from here. I found this helpful to grasp exactly what max wanted from the storyline and I could see what I liked and didn't.

 This is an example of changes we have made, I felt the knife wasn't in conjunction with the film noir genre and Max agreed. Since this photograph was taken, we added several shots that link the narrative better.

This will be the sequence in which the credits roll over, This is shown in the previous sheet with the post it saying 'Credits'. We have since refined what we want to put in here and there is more of a narrative flow. We have also decided to use a rotary phone and an old style film camera to cooperate with the expected mise-en-scene of the genre.

This is one of my proposed ideas for how we could introduce the street and the pictures could have replaced the jump shots. We discussed it's advantages and disadvantages and we decided there were too many impracticalities and it wouldn't have been a great aesthetic improvement. For this to work, we would have to either take original pictures or source photos from a third party and then style them as actual 40's photographs, then decide on how to film. For little benefit, it is a lot of work and we don't think it is worth our time.

All in all, I think this was a very productive lesson and we worked efficiently and effectively as a team. I am genuinely excited to get this sorted out and cannot wait to see the final film.