Project 1 - Film Noir Analysis

Film Noir

As part of our first filming for our assignment, we were set into groups to create a short minute film on Film Noir. Here a list of who's in my group and the roles within the group:

My group:
Director - Liam King
Lighting/Boom Operator - Kimberly McClarnan
Camera Operator - Emily Barresi
Production Sound Mixer - Rhianwen Davies

Actors:
James Colvin
Alex Jones
Jamie Brown

Lighting -
My role during this first filming was setting out and being in charge of using the lights. My job was to follow the directors instructions on where he would like to place the lights to create the dark film noir setting. By learning the basics of the three point lighting is a good start as they are mainly used for lighting the face for terminology as noir setups. Some of the lighting the director wanting was 'hard lights' which leave sharped edged shadows which is created by a single point source of light where the light rays are running more or less from a single point in space. It almost defines the film noir look which is alternating patterns of dark and light slashes.

Boom Operator -
Another job of mine was being the boom operator which is an assistant of the production sound mixer. My responsibility of the boom operator is microphone placement using a boom pole with a microphone attached to the end and my aim is to hold the microphone as close to the actors or action as possible without allowing the microphone or boom pole to enter the cameras frame.

Overall Performance -
In my opinion, we all worked well as a group. We all stuck to our roles and got on well and followed instructions and we all helped each other out. I found the lighting ok as all I had to do was set them up and move them to the place the director wanted it to be but mainly most of the work I did was being the boom operator which was good but at most times tricky as for the amount of time I had to hold the boom pole above me for long which made my arms ache but overall I enjoyed the roles I took part during this project and this would help me in the future for more upcoming projects. I didn't really enjoy working on lights and I think I wouldn't want to work on lights in the future but I enjoyed being boom operator also but it was hard work as you need a lot of strength and balance to hold the boom pole in place above the actors heads.

Problems? -
There were a few problems during filming for this. The main problem were that due to the actors, they kept laughing and forgetting lines which resulted in longer time and also that the battery of the camera and for the sound were low so we had to wait for half hour for them both to charge back up. Also, with the lighting you can see shadows in the back ground but I made sure that I fixed them mistakes and made sure that they won't be on show again.