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. 

The Black Dahila | Film

The black Dahlia is a film based in the 1940's with the genre of film noir, or neo-noir as they call the newer more updated versions of film noir,  these tend to be in a slightly desaturated colour, rather than the traditional Black and White, L.A. Confidential followed this same style too, which is where I got the inspiration from to create my images in the desaturated style. The Black Dahlia was written by James Ellroy who also wrote L.A. Confidential. The film is based around the true murder of Elizabeth Short nicknamed The Black Dahlia, for her unsolved death, this is just on of the films/book adaptation of the unknown events of the woman's killing.

The main character played by Josh Harnett opens to movie with a narrative voice over, this is again similar to L.A. Confidential, I am a fan of how this style of telling a story or just to inform the story more with a narrative to introduce the characters and the general story is a nice way to engage the viewer into the story, and is something I would like to experiment with my digital piece as I feel it would definitely inform my story in a positive way.

The story also follows the story of two ambitious cops who are tackling the case, and along the way encounter troubles with former crooks who are released from prison or either somehow involved with the new case, there are damsels which need saving added into the mix too, which all just adds to the noir style of film which is what I particularly like about it, I find this style of filming is very inspirational and is my reasoning for wanting to create work from this.

What I have taken from watching this film and also L.A. Confidential is that I would like to experiment with my images in both Black and White and in a desaturated colour, to see which would work best for my film piece. I like the noir style of images with just them being slightly desaturated with an almost sepia tint to them I think it works beautifully and fits well to the dark style of the story line. So from watching these I will be experimenting to see what style images work best to inform my work.

Chris Marker | La Jetee

Chris Marker created a film/sequence comprising entirely of photographs with this he used a voice over to tell the story of the post nuclear war experiment in time travel, the video is 28 minutes long which personally I find to be quite a long piece of film considering it is more or less all still photographs. I find the film to be quite moving and sad, the tone of voice used helps to give depth and feeling to the men and women who are featured in the film, not only this but the music which accompanies the film is also that of a sad nature which really cuts deep for me personally as it really does add more to the emotion of the images being shown to us in a slow manner. 

This video in particular uses a flashback narrative strategy this is shown in a way that uses photographs to bring the viewer back to a time in which they are trying to reach at the same time as the man undergoing the experiment is experiencing it. The video helps to document the experiment and what happened during this time as well as the man's own experiences. The narration over the top helps to glide the story along with the added help of visual imagery moving at a pace which is sufficient with the story.

This work is similar to the style of work I would like to produce. After my tutorial with Ellen Nolan I decided to look at creating film still images to work in a sequence similar to this rather than creating a film in the short time which I have before the mid review, So as far as this research is concerned I feel this fits very well with my work as this is also working as a linear narrative with the imagery within the story as well as focusing on flashbacks. A flashback isn't something I would like to create in my work personally as I don't feel at the moment as my work is in depth enough with the story to incorporate this, However the aspect of using a voice over is something I would very much like to experiment with within this unit.

Video Sourse: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqMEc0oe4yc

Cindy Sherman | Film Stills

In my tutorial with Ellen Nolan I mentioned that for one of my photography pieces I would very much like to create film still style images, from this it was clear that the work of Cindy Sherman was very relevant to what I want to create.

Cindy Sherman's work titled 'Untitled film stills' 1977-1980 very much takes the approach of looking at how women are depicted in films on TV and in magazines in a way of looking at how women can be stereotyped. She has said in her work she doesn't see herself she she's a character that she has portrayed usually from famous films. I very much like this work she created I feel it depicts women in a way they are portrayed in films, despite these all being staged and purposeful created to look like film stills they are extremely convincing, if you were to show these images to someone who didn't know this work of hers or her herself for that matter I don't think they would be able to tell that these are not in fact actual film stills.

I have/will be taking inspiration from this work in the way that I want to create not only a film on this particular unit but I would like to create my own 'film still' images without actually creating a film for my digital piece, these images are very cinematic despite not actually being taken with a filming camera which I feel is incredibly well done and despite being very deceiving. The images in this series are in black and white which is what I would like my work to be shot in as I feel it fits in with the theme of film noir which I would like to carry through all of this work I think the lack of colour in the images gives a deeper sense of mystery particularly if the story goes down a darker route with atmosphere. Not only this but it gives verisimilitude in the sense that in the 1940's images would have been in black and white as colour was only just being attempted at this time. I feel the authenticity of this is important so I would like to experiment with this in black and white film despite this not being my strongest area, however if I feel this was not successful in any way then I will be carrying this shoot out in digital and attempt to create a series of images of this style.

Image source one: http://tristonrobinson.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/cindy-shermans-untitled-film-stills-and-postmodernism/ 

Image source two: http://imageobjecttext.com/2012/01/19/in-the-kitchen-with-cindy/