The most obvious option and most common in terms of filters for film noir movies is a monochrome filter. This is best for traditional film noir movies set in the 1940s or 1950s. This can be seen in this screenshot of "The Man Who Wasn't There", set in late the 1940s. However, with the rise of "neo-noir" movies, other editing techniques have been used, such as sepiascale (use of browns instead of a black to white scale), this example being from the opening scene of "Gangster Squad". Also in "Gangster Squad", I found examples of footage where the colour is not completely monochrome, but highly undersaturated. For my test footage to experiment with these filters, I am using the video we made for our preliminary task.
I found this tutorial series on using Adobe After Effects to make clips resemble film noir movies. I already have After Effects on my home computer, albeit a fairly old version, so I thought it would be a good idea to try and use it on our video.
I immediately had issues as many of the options the tutorial told me to use were according to the layout on the newer versions, meaning I had to spend time attempting to find what he was talking about using trial and error.
Following the tutorial exactly did not result in the effect I was looking for. It's far too dark.
I attempted to use the "dust and scratches" effect on after effects to make the video appear more old and weathered, like an old film, but for some reason, despite having a fairly good graphics card on my computer, I had trouble rendering it. I couldn't get the effect to play in the end, so I settled for a static noise layer.
I figured out how to adjust the saturation of the video, and reduced it greatly to resemble traditional film noir. I also changed the colours in the gradient the tutorial instructed me to create to shades of brown, in an attempt to imitate the effect in "Gangster Squad".
This turned out to be fairly effective, and I can definitely consider using it for our final piece.
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