Film Noir Continuity Task: Planning

Over the past few weeks, we were given an assignment to create a Film Noir short, combining the elements we looked studied beforehand and a well-known fairy tale. Our group decided to use the story from Cinderella. We had to plan the characters, how we would change them, as well as the narrative to make it more suitable to the Film Noir genre. The outcome of the task is to create a film including a scene of a character walking through a door, crossing a room, sitting down and having a conversation with someone. Below were the requirements:

• Shot reverse shot
• Match on action
• 180 degree rule
• Set action: a person opens a door, walks through and across a room, sits, and exchanges dialogue with another person

We wanted to make Cinderella the 'every-woman,' more commonly seen as the 'every-man' in classic Film Noirs, as she works hard and as she cleans in the original, we used this has her 'every-day' kind of job. The role of 'femme-fatale' is the Prince, and the villain is the fairy-godmother. We decided to do this as so often in classic Film Noirs, the women are portrayed as bad, and scary and their sexuality is seen as a bad thing, so we wanted to show that women can have good morals and be sexual, instead of having to choose between the two. The villain is the fairy-godmother, although all her motives are reasonable. 

Below is a rough plan of the first ideas we had:

Script 

The script was written predominantly by Chloe, it was rough, so we could work around it if the lines and stage directions didn't feel right or didn't work with where we were filming. I edited the script and re-wrote a few lines that I didn't think felt right or suited the story line. As we had little time to perfect the script, not everything sounds completely serious, and in my opinion occasionally takes away from the darkness of the film. Below are some images of the script. 

Chloe re-drafted the final scene, as we had to come back and make some changes as it was too long to fit into the final film. Here is an image of that:

I will be posting more about the process of making our film soon.