influences for sound

i have been very inspired by the soundtrack in ‘The Hobbit an unexpected journey’ which was directed by Peter Jackson. I was really moved by the soundtrack in this film because of themes that run throughout the film for example there is the theme-tune of the shire and this theme is reintroduced whenever Bilbo refers back to his shire and his life before his journey. The theme-tune helps to remind the audience of the peaceful shire.

Romance

 romance  

  • A young boy and girl meet in a diner and they start to flirt with each other, their parents hate each other so they are forced to keep their relationship a secret.  
  • The boy asks the girl to meet him at the beach and he is devastated to discover that the girl’s parents have arranged for her to marry another man, he asks her to meet him again, later that night  and when she gets home , the girl writes a note and she goes to the beach and the lovers   it is implied that they ran away together.  
  • The girl’s mother discovers the letter and she screams.  

Influences 

  • Rome + Juliet (1996 Baz Lhurman)  
  • Breathless (1960, Jean Luc Godard)  – the film had a sad ending  
  • French New Wave  
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Slapstick comedy

  • Image result for singing in the rain
  • I will use over saturated colours to heighten the comedic tone of the film and to give it an aura of unreality.
  • The style of comedy will be exaggerated in order to heighten the laughs 

 

The comedy will take a large part of it’s inspiration from the comedy of the absurd which emphasisies unexpected juxtapositions and situations. In this case , an ordinary everyday scenario is blown wildly out of proportion by an unexpected event.

The narrative will also have some surrealist elements due to the fact that at the beginning , four women are sitting at a coffee table and they then begin to argue about who stole a diamond ring from one of the women and at the end a random jewel thief appears , with no explanation given and confesses to stealing the ring.

Neo Noir

My crime drama film will be a neo – noir that is like Blade Runner. The film will be stylized in a way that is reminiscent of the 1940’s. 

  • Catharine Johnson is the granddaughter of a wealthy man called Lenard Johnson and she is going to visit him, but when she arrives, she finds that he has died under suspicious circumstances.
  • The police are called, and Catharine is named as a suspect, even though she had arrived after the death of her grandfather, since she was left a lot of money in her grandfather’s will. Catharine loved her grandfather and recalls fond memories from her childhood when he took her in after her parents died. He has left her a plain wooden box in his will, and he left her a letter which says that the contents are “very important” and that she must only open it in the most “dire of circumstances” 
  • The police suspect Catherine of murdering her grandfather and Henry Hornby, the police chief is particularly quick to accuse her, and this seems suspicious to Catherine, so she looks in the box that her grandfather gave her, and she discovers that Hornby used to be Lenard Johnson’s business partner but he tried to swindle her grandfather out of his earnings and her grandfather cut him out of the business. This revelation causes Catharine to realize that it was Hornby that murdered her grandfather. Hornby enters and tells her that her assumptions are correct and that he killed her parents as well, he attempts to kill her to cover up his crimes, but she escapes, and Hornby is arrested for his crimes and as he is dragged out of the building , he swears that he’ll get his revenge.

I have decided not to show Catherine’s grandfather in order to create an enigma around him , we will only hear about him from the other characters.

The cinematography will be shot in black and white in homage to classic film noir, particularly films like The Maltese Falcon and it will help to establish it in the film noir genre, and I want the audience to feel like they are watching something that they are familiar with. 

I will also use 1940’s era terms in my writing to help give the film the feeling that it is set in the past but some of the visuals will hint that the film could be set in the modern day , my inspiration for this is the TV series Riverdale , which looks like it is set in the 1950’s but the characters have access to modern technology.

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My film will have the femme fatale , which is a common archetype in the genre , and make her the main character , which is a subversion of the common trope where the femme fatale is an object that is perused by the main male character and I wanted to challenge that trope by deliberately not giving her any love interest.

The personality of the femme fatale is not usually developed beyond the fact that she is the object of male attention , so I wanted to hate the audience into the inner world of the femme fatal and to make us empathize with her , as opposed to the men who objectify her and mistreat her.