Choosing Music | Last Minute Idea

Whilst editing my digital piece to have my voice over match the images correctly I felt it was a little too quite with no background noise, so it was advised to me to include some Ambient music behind the dialogue, I quite liked the idea as I found there to be no background noise what so ever which usually isn't bad but typically in films there are tones used throughout to add suspense to the narrative.

I searched through my research and scoured through films to find any tracks which I thought might be relevent and found myself again coming back to Sin City, the music used in this is very ambient and adds suspense to the film which is exactly what I wanted for my work, I found the album on YouTube and listened to all the tracks to find one which would fit the theme and parts of the sequence I have created, I didnt want anything which was too loud or was too deep in level. I decided to go for 'Her name was Goldie' Which in the film is used when Marv wakes up to discover Goldie murdered in her sleep and goes on a rampage to find her killer. This to me was perfect I found the scene to be similar to what i have created in my work and for that reason thought the music would work well in the piece.

I layered the music to play alongside the images and the voice over, lowering its volume so that it can just be heard under my narrators voice to add a little more suspense to the images, this I thought worked brilliantly as I found the music peaked at times in the sequence where it was needed to add the suspense, it filled the gaps of silence (which were minimal) but works very well. the music was looped so that it played through the whole sequence as it was originally a little short to begin with, but I found where the music stopped in the middle was perfect for that particular image and dialogue and then began again at the right point for the ending I faded the sound out which works really well with the fade out from the image and my narrators voice. I am really happy with this piece as a whole as the music fits perfectly and personally i think the volume is at the right pitch/volume to inform my narrative successfully.

Images For Newspaper Print

For my Newspaper article I needed to find some images I had taken which would illustrate the story well. After doing some research into the films I had watched I had discovered that back in the old day they would actually use images of the deceased on the front cover of Newspapers as well as other images of the scene of the crime, this I found really interesting and wanted to do for my own tabloid print. When it came to choosing my own images for the front cover I wanted to have a picture of Jessica dead on the bed but I didn't want to use one of the images I already used in my digital piece and I wanted it to look as though it was taken by a journalist photographer rather than the idea of a film still image, for that reason I chose this image below as its a true depiction of what happened and I feel it looks as though it was taken by someone visiting the scene of the crime, I also picked the image below that for the reason it shows part of the scene which had happened. In my article I have spoken about both the scenes so they both seemed very fitting with the text I had created. For these images I added a slight tint to make them appear slightly older as well as adding some contrast and black and white filter so that they look darker and more contrast like in the image to fit the decade and genre better. I do like these images and with my final piece they work really well with the text and the whole composition.

Publication Article

To write my publication article for my Newpaper print, i looked up various newspaper articles on murder which wasn't particularly pleasant but I needed to find the right sort of language for my piece I was writing, however as  was only really able to find more recent articles say from the last 10 years the dialogue didn't quite match the decade in which I was writing for, so for this reason I kind of gave up on the more modern texts I found. I decided to go back to the films I had watched which used Newspaper articles and voice overs to extract the right style of speaking and text use for my work, I decided to focus more on again L.A. Confidential as there was a voice over from a journalist who write a Gossip style magazine, there were also screen grabs from newspapers which I could just about decipher to think up some sort of text to go along with my story, which would fit well with the theme.

I decided to go for a slightly more chatty and gossipy style mixing up a bit of controversy within my article so that it gives more information on film than the film gives itself, as my digital piece is open ended you don't really get the full story, but my idea with this was to open it up a little more and give its viewer a bit more insight into what was really going on in my digital or really how they perceived it, its really designed to make a guessing game and offer up different scenarios of what could have happened to my victim Jessica Knox and what was the reason for Jack Cohen my Detective for being in her apartment that night.

Below is the article piece I have written for my newspaper, with the language being taken from films and newspapers I have read in relation to my theme of crime and noir.

23year old Jessica Knox (pictured right) was found shot dead in her apartment in the early hours of yesterday morning. Detective come lover Jack Cohen, discovered her with a bullet wound to the chest, while presumably sleeping in her apartment alone. Her body has been moved to the county morgue where a post mortem will be held later today. But who would kill such an angelic damsel? Miss Knox was known for a few brush in’s with the law, being put down to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time as per usual. It has been said that no force of entry was found on the apartment, predicting that Miss Knox knew her killer. Was it the seemingly innocent lover Jack Cohen? Had a lover’s feud gotten too much for the couple that he lashed out with devastating consequences?  After all no one knew the two we’re involved until last night. However having found her body and being seen snivelling at the scene of the crime is he to blame, were they tears of regret or tears of sadness for the loss of his lover in the bed? Through further questioning which took place through the night jack told fellow policemen that he entered the apartment to find a drunken bottle of whiskey on the kitchen table prior to hearing a mysterious noise in which he investigated to find poor Jessica Knox dead in her bed. Are there any clues as to who may have shot her? Only that it must have been someone she knew, knew enough to invite into her home… disturbance to the scene of the crime is known… there was a window open (later closed by jack) perhaps her killer climbed through the window and shot the unsuspecting damsel whilst she slept. Was the lady mixed up in business she shouldn’t have, as said before she was known to police as an associate to organised crime gangs running around in New York City. Now I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions but something tells me she got herself caught up in something she shouldn’t. Running around with New York gangs dealing with drugs, prostitution and murder whilst sleeping with a Detective? Who is known for his mysterious ways of dealing with thugs, something doesn’t smell right to me. But again she was a beautiful woman she could have gotten herself caught up in something with another female, maybe this was an act of vengeance or jealousy. Who knows what secrets lay behind this devastating tale of love and murder? All we know is a young innocent female lost her life in a tragic attack against her, or perhaps against the mysterious Detective Cohen with a little corruption and mistrust thrown in for good measure this is a case to keep an eye one. All you need to know is I’ll get the details circling the case, you know where to come for an honest telling of the tales. For now may Jessica Knox Rest in Peace. And may her killer be found and put to justice.

I feel happy with what I have written I did do a few drafts of this and altered any text as I went and proof read my article I also got others to read the piece to give me their opinion on what I had written and whether it links well with my digital piece as I liked the idea of them being linked together in this way, I liked this idea because I thought it went well with the films I had watched and the general way the old tabloids and crime went in history, where there was crime there was an article about it and that still follows up today however I do feel the writing technique and style has dramatically changed in the years and I certainly have followed the more traditional abrupt route into it.

Draft One | Draft Two

After doing my research further in L.A Confidential and how they use newspapers throughout the film I had to have a re think about how I was doing my initial draft of my publication, I began by using the Newspaper title as the largest piece of text, when actually the largest piece of writing should be the headline below that, as you can see below I  began my first draft by doing it slightly incorrectly, for this reason I began a second draft in which I just re created what I was doing and whilst doing that I looked closely at the film pausing it to be able to see what was said on the from of Newspaper of the day so that I could incorporate it into my own Newspaper print.

As you can see from the images above, I changed quite a few pieces around so that they would link closely to the research i have done from the film stills. in my second draft I have made the title of the Newspaper smaller and created a direct and obvious headline which is bigger as it is the focal point, I also extracted quite difficultly some of the smaller text used on the Newspaper in L.A. Confidential which would be more legit to the time period and used them in my own work, for example the 9A.M Final is taken from some imagery as well as the idea of date, number of pages, issues and price etc. which I have altered slightly to my own preferences, below you can see the pieces which I took my inspiration from I have highlighted the parts which I have directly taken and some parts which I have done some alterations to. This particular shot was very helpful in allowing me to see the style of writing and the layout of how Newspapers would have been typically layed out.

L.A Confidential | News Paper Research

In the realisation that I am going to create a Newspaper print instead of my Graphic Novel for my publication it reminded me of the L.A. Confidential film I watched earlier on in the unit, the film had a narration by a journalist throughout who was a character in the film as well the voice over, to go along with his narration they also included Newspaper prints which merged in with the film stills and motion images of the events that were happening throughout the film which predominantly were based around murder or homicide (as they call it) which is perfect research for the piece I am creating as I feel I want to do the work from a journalist point of view of the events that has happened in my story, and for this I feel would be very beneficial.

After going through the film again to find the places in which the Newspaper pieces were I found them very useful to me when it came to designing my publication, from looking at these prints I have found that the name of the paper isn't always in fact in most cases is smaller than the actual headline which is something I got wrong when doing my first design of my newspaper. Only having the newer newspapers of today isn't the most ideal way to research 1940's style newspapers covering homicide cases.

From what I realised in watching this film is that murder was something put on the front page of a paper and not just the title but the image of the dead body at the scene of the crime, which works well for me as I have images such as this from my many shoots in trying to capture the 'perfect' dead body image for my work, these give me a relatively clear idea of what I could create as I said more so than the newer papers of today as film productions must have researched into this further in order for them to create something genuine looking for the film, this has been really helpful and has certainly got me under way with designing my Newspaper Journalist piece.

Throughout this film I also picked up some slang which may help me with my dialogue for the publication piece as it wouldn't help at all to have modern terminologies when I'm trying to focus my pieces on the 1940's / 1950's

Dialogue Picked Up:

• "Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush."
• Ruckus
• Homicide
• Crooks
• Organised Crime
• Dapper Gent
• Balls of Brass
• You heard it here first
• Busted
• Showbiz
• 
  

Useful Tips to consider : From Film

Rhetorical Questions

Be a movie star

Newspaper Types and Formats

To create my publication, I wanted to look further into what types of newspaper there were out there, there are many variations of different styles of newspaper, but there are three in particular which tend to be used all over the UK. These would be Broadsheet, Tabloid and Berliner. the fotmats vary in each style of newspaper depending on the publication within them.

Broadsheets

Broadsheets tend to be seen as the higher quality journalism newspaper, they tend to be the largest as well, making them slightly less readable whilst commuting (which many people do)

• The Daily Telegraph
• Sunday Telegraph
• The Sunday Times
• Financial Times
• The Observer
• The Times
• The Independent

Berliner

The Berliner paper fits between both broadsheets and tabloids, they don't have any particular association with the quality of its reporting, I suppose you could say the Berliner is a happy medium between the other two formats, not only in size but by giving both styles of writing.

• The Guardian

Tabloid

Is the smallest of the newspaper formats and is one which has a reputation for containing the worst journalism. I found out by means of research that the term tabloid is older than the actual tabloid format, it is just a term which is applied to anything small. typically the tabloid is associated with bad journalism and gossip style writings, many broadsheet newspapers which have taken on the tabloid size have try to avoid the bad connotations of a tabloid paper and have taken on the 'compact' format rather than tabloid of this reason.

• The Mirror
• The Sun
• Daily Express
• Daily Mail
• Daily Star

After doing research into the main styles of newspaper I found it interesting to see how different newspaper tackles headlines and ways of writing. I found this helped me to figure out what style of paper mine will be, as much as I would like it to be a Berliner as it sits very much in the middle, I feel my newspaper would work best with the Tabloid format, purely for its chatty style which from what I have seen in my research is very much how many articles were written of the time, I think this would work well anyway given that it is a publication which is speculating idea's of what's happened which in its simplest form is just gossiping. I feel this has helped inform my work and give me the chance to work forward with a tabloid style of writing.

Researching Newspaper Designs and Language

For my research into my publication as I want it to be a News paper publication I began attempting to research newspapers from the 1940's area, this became slightly harder to find as they're are very little resources out there allowing me to actually view content, I stumbled across the British newspaper archive to which I narrowed down my search to certain decades in which I was interested in, this proved to be quite difficult as i found it hard to narrow down to this particular time, however my reasoning for this was that I wanted to be able to extract the style of writing and language to interpret into my own Newspaper print, I found with this website I needed to have a paid membership to be able to have full access to the full archive of newspapers which I couldn't afford so the image below illustrates just the amount of information I was able to grab without membership, despite not being able to get full information/language from the newspaper articles it did help me with the layout of broadsheets and tabloids etc of the day which is something I wasn't too sure on either when it comes to creating my own. 

From the screen grabs below you can see where I have tried to narrow down my search for Murder style news prints, however this was less than helpful as I particularly want a headline front page for my work which this website just wasn't able to offer me it gave me tons of images of newspapers which just listed columns and columns of articles which is not the style I want to create. 

Despite this not being very constructive it did help in leading me to other means of research into the design aspect of my work, as for the language I feel this is something I may have to pick up from more films which I had previously watched and maybe from film critique articles. 

Change of Idea

After realising that both my ideas for my digital piece and my publication were basically telling the same story I had to change my idea as I found I was too stuck in my ways with the Graphic Novel idea that instead of needing to edit the way I used the images as Ellen Nolan had told me to do, she said I should try to re arrange the images to the text to see which worked better at telling a story the image or the texts, however through my research I had stuck to my guns with having the story following the story of the screenplay I have written exactly which didn't help with telling a different story, because I didn't want to change this idea just a little bit I have decided to completely change my publication idea.

Below is a draft/mock up of how I originally wanted to my publication piece to look like as a graphic novel, as I said above this is something I have my heart set on creating for my entire screenplay, but I found the unit didn't allow any leeway in doing what I really wanted to do which personally is not good at all! however I do have plans to further my work personally to allow to me experiment with this idea further perhaps expanding into different areas of narrative in my own time so that way I can create work I am happy with.

So my change of idea came in a tutorial with Natasha while discussing others work, as part of the unit I have looked at various films following the genre of Film Noir and Crime, because of this I have also looked at film critiques of certain films which i thought might help me a long the way, from this I have decided to create a News Paper publication, as yet I'm not sure whether I want the piece to be in a journalism style telling the tragic story of the couple in my digital piece or whether I would like to write it from a film critiques point of view who may be looking at the piece of work. From this I will look into various newspaper styles from the 1940's and present as well as more film critiques to find an area which interests me most and I will work from this to produce my publication.

The Singing Detective

Ellen Nolan advised me to look at The Singing Detective which is a series drama from the BBC written and aired in the 80's, she said that this style programme would fit well with the theme of my work, the story revolves around a struggling writer who is hospitalised with psoriatic arthritis, in researching this I found the writer of this Dennis Potter actually suffered with the same condition (not perhaps relevant but interesting) the actor seems to reflect exactly what the writer (Dennis) was going through. The writer in the story Phillip Marlow refused to take medication and as a result falls into a fantasy world involving The Singing Detective a form of escapism and adventure.

In watching this i honestly found it quite difficult as i found some of the imagery hard to look at, however taking this out of account the programme fits quite well with the style of work i want to create, a voice over is often used to narrate what's going on or to describe a place, the use of a voice over is something I like in works of narrative and the style of the dialogue is something I am keen to look at as i need to adapt this into my publication and digital piece in order for them to seem authentic.
This series uses a style of flashbacks which switch between the writer who's fantasy world were viewing and the actual fantasy world so you get an insight to the reality and fake, this works nicely and fits well as the writer mumbles what he wants to happen in the other world by sometimes saying exactly what the 'detective says' which I feel connects them well. Flashbacks are something which interest me but I don't feel it is something I want to use in my work I like it how it is leaving the story being open ended for the audience to interpret for themselves.

This series most certainly borrows from Film Noir using its style of cinematography to create a noir like series in the fantasy world, the images seem desaturated and dark which is something I have tried to do with my experiments as I feel it adds the edge to the images of an older era.

I tried my best with this series, it is usually the sort of programme/film I am interested in but I found I just could not get to grips with it my concentration lacked with it and I found myself looking at other things, despite this I did take some aspects of it for my own work, for example the way of shooting I particularly liked such as the image about with the woman and the man sitting down with her is at a slight angle which I particularly like within images this has been taken and used within a couple of my images as I feel it adds a little something more interesting to an image. As well as this some of the language used has helped me in extracting things which may be useful for my publication work, so for this reason I do not think it was a complete waste I just hope I could have gotten more into the series to watch a few more than just 3 episodes however as I said i was able to gain some knowledge from the work to influence my own work.

Black and White - Option Two

Since I knew I wanted to create a graphic novel based around the style of Frank Millers Sin City which is in black and white high contrast, I decided along with my desaturated images I would also create some black and white images for the Graphic Novel publication I was going to make. However as I began to edit there were some images I really liked and felt worked really well with the dramaticy I wanted to create and linked well with the Noir and Silent films I have been watching for more research, but then again there were also images which didn't look as great in black and white and which contrast just looked quite ghastly and fake which is something I didn't want and don't particularly like in my work. However I did carry on with a number of edits to see if they could work and how they may change the whole structure into an alternative narrative. This hadn't previously occurred to me that this may happen until the review when it was mentioned in my notes from David Rule. I wasn't sure how I felt about the narrative changing as I very much liked how it had originally been written without it being depicted differently in just the editing and presentation. I feel I have enough diversity in my narrative structures given that despite both being open ended and in linear form I have incorporated a voice over in my digital piece and I wish to have use of text for my publication which originally isn't what I wanted as I am very much a fan of "let the images carry the narrative forward" which is what I said in the beginning of my research as Frank Miller does this with his Graphic Novel work which I have followed through throughout my work. Below are some images which I have edited into black and white here you can see that some of the images work quite well and are dramatic in the style I wanted to create, however there are also some which just don't work well at all and for that reason I feel I will not carry this through my final work.

First Experiments

Since I began shooting a few weeks ago I have done about six shoots of photographs to make up my sequence, (contact sheets in book) here I thought I would upload some of my edits I am most fond of and think that I would like to follow through with the rest of my edits for the work,

In relation to how much I edit my photos I am not a fan of too much over editing so a lot of the images are either desaturated or black and white as these are both styles I would like to play around with for my final pieces. However I am a tad unsure on how I feel about my Black and White images not only do some not look quite right but it will take me a lot of time to have to do two sets of edits, so I need to decide whether it is worth me experimenting so much over something which may not work so well in the end and consequently not get used at all. To figure this out I will edit a few more Black and White images to make up my mind without getting too carried away with it.

The first image is one of my favourites as I really like how the smoke is brilliantly highlighted by the flash, I think this is very dramatic and very Noir like in its style, this is something I do not think would work as well if it was without colour, but with a little desaturation I feel it works beautifully. However in contrast the very last image works very well without colour it has been made to look dark and eerie with a slight sinister feel to it by being dark adding dramatics to the mix which is of course something I am trying to create, it is just a case of me choosing which route I wish to go down.

'Brandishing Gun' - Test

I am currently editing my stills and how I would like them to appear in my digital piece. Before I got too carried away I decided to piece together the images which consisted of continuous photo's such as this one 'Brandishing gun' and another of a gun dropping to the floor, I did this as I feel these would be the hardest parts of the work to get just right, In this test only one of the images is edited how I want it to be, but it gives me a good idea of how I want the work to look, particularly the parts of the film which are in sequence with each other such as this piece. 

This short video hasn't been edited yet to have the quickness of the final piece however it works to give me an idea of how to put the work together for my final piece, for that reason I found this helpful in my development of my final piece which is slowly coming together, I feel that this sort of sequence which should appear 2/3 times with different images throughout the film would work better with a 0.05 of a second so they're quick and flashing through much like a film but with the use of photographs instead.

 I think this could work quite successfully, from doing this I will now work on creating my final digital piece in the hope that they work successfully as a whole.