Dan's Evaluation - Questions 1, 6 and 7

Film: Noose (Link here)

Question 1:

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?



The Usual Suspects - keeping his face a mystery

On the left is the unknown character

A significant part of thriller films is enigma, or having the audience ask questions (usually in their head). This is particularly prevalent in The Usual Suspects, especially during the opening scenes. In our film, we very much made sure that a lot of what we were showing was unexplained, as it is only meant to be the first two minutes of a feature-length film. We did not explain who had set up the noose, or whether it had been used, we only implied that the protagonist killed the man in the woods, and we definitely did not explicitly mention the mental illness (Schizophrenia) that our protagonist had. We tried to make our protagonist an "anti-hero", where he is the main character, but he is not necessarily doing what he does for the good of everyone, or even himself.



"I just missed your heart."

"What have you done?"

As such, our narration is very restricted. We have two lines of dialogue (which, funnily enough, is the same amount as we had in the preliminary task), both of which are not really in a conversation, just thrown at the protagonist in passing. This is fairly similar to Hanna, where the only line of speech is said by Hanna just before the title. The protagonist also knows more than the audience does, such as the aforementioned Schizophrenia, who had used the noose and who had murdered the man in the woods. The audience has to piece together the bits of the protagonist's past.

When it came to aspects of mise-en-scene, our film does not deviate too far from the norm of thrillers, except perhaps in colour. During the hospital scenes, the colours are fairly dark and drab as we shot during the night, but during the woods scene in the morning, everything is rather saturated and vivid. This was done for two reasons:

It seems visible enough

1. We needed to differentiate the noose from the background. Our rope was fairly small and thin, and it did not help that the colour was a bright yellow. The OTS shot during our film was actually helpful in showing the noose, as it was placed with a tree directly behind it, causing a clash of colours.
2. Our protagonist is a drug user, and one of the common symptoms of various drugs is seeing the world differently, or hallucinations. We tried to make the woods seem a little psychedelic, without changing the scenery or distorting anything too much (aside from the OTS shot with the noose).

Otherwise, the film stuck to traditional thriller properties, such as urban costumes, blood, pale make-up, mental hospital setting, etc.

Todorov's narrative rules only sometimes apply during our film. Our equilibrium is never really set, as almost the first thing we see is our protagonist escaping a mental hospital. It could be said that our equilibrium was set during the very first shot where an unknown character walks out of the hospital, but that is not particularly relevant to the story, rather a way of using an establishing shot, and leading towards the protagonist's escape.

The disruption occurs in two places. Part one is where the protagonist escapes, and part two is where he spots the noose and the body in the woods. The realisation comes after the second part, where he realises what he has done (purely implied) and runs off into the woods.

Restoration attempt?

Typically, this would lead onto attempting to restore order, and it could be said that the final shot, where two unknown characters walk up to the fainted protagonist is the beginning of the restoration. However, from that point on, the film would continue, and it would be past the first two minutes. The equilibrium would appear again at the end of the film, possibly with the protagonist back inside of the mental hospital.

Question 6:

What have you learned about technologies from the process of constructing this product?

The products we used were:

• Digital Camera
• Spotlight
• Tripod
• Mac (GarageBand, Final Cut Pro)
• Lapel Microphone

In each of our settings, we had a different camera, and this had a small effect on our editing. One camera shot everything in a much higher resolution than the other one, which - while not particularly noticeable - is still an issue that we had to address by making them at least the same aspect ratio. Otherwise, we learned that the batteries run out extremely quickly, and so we needed to work fairly fast. White balance was also an issue, as we forgot to specifically bring white objects, but we worked with ones that we had around us, such as a white wall and Ross' jumper.

The spotlight was fairly simple, and as such there wasn't much to learn. Moving the wheel up made it more powerful, and moving it down made it less so. The tripod was also difficult to put back into its more portable position, but we quickly learned how to do it efficiently.

The Mac was definitely the hardest piece of tech to work with. While I cannot speak for the other members of the group, I can say personally that it was a very unpleasant experience. As a predominant Windows user (and occasionally Linux), getting accustomed to Apple's file system and how each of the applications worked was extremely frustrating. That being said, we did manage. We found out how to apply filters, from colour correction to distortions, we found out how to get the files from two different projects into one main project, and how to transition with more than just a normal cut, such as wipe and dissolve.

Using the Mac and getting a little more used to it has not converted me from Windows or Linux yet.

Question 7:

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learned in the progression from it to the full product?

Our group was only like it is now after we started the main task, and as such we were split into two groups. I was with Ross, and our film was about an interrogation between two men.

We were pretty pleased with how it turned out, but there were a few things which we had to improve for our main task. Lighting was one of these areas. Our prelim was set in a dark room, and this was for a reason. We had a standing spotlight which we used in shot to show the victim from the darkness, and we implied that it had been turned on by the interrogator or his colleagues. This still did not really prove to be enough light, especially as this was entirely focused on one of the two people, and as they sat down one was far brighter than the other. This did look odd, and perhaps shifted focus onto someone who was not talking at the time, or was not doing anything relevant.



We have varying amounts of lighting intensity

In our main task, we had two settings, one set at night and one set in the morning. The morning light proved useful, creating nice lighting effects and stylish lens flares, but we also used the spotlight to emphasise particular props like the noose. During the night, we had the spotlight on every shot, highlighting the whole area, or just a particular point (like the hospital sign).

The prelim had some editing issues. In one of our shots, we had broken the 180 degree rule ever so slightly with an OTS shot. We had to remove the shot entirely from the final cut. During our main task this didn't prove to be a problem, has we did not have any dialogue between two people, but even so we spent the majority of the time on the actor's right side.

When it came to sound, we were much better at choosing and placing them in the main task. Our prelim had no ambient sound, just music or dialogue. It felt very much like a film set, and unnaturally quiet. We made sure to change this in our main task, and included ambient sounds for every shot, as well as music and other non-diegetic sounds.