Deconstruction: Student Film Noir Opening - The Fatale Kiss

I found an AS film noir to use for inspiration, "The Fatale Kiss", it is about a runner within a gang and his affair with a gang member's daughter. It's not very high quality, but it provides some good examples of what can be achieved with almost no budget or experience. It is also not a film opening, it appears to be a short, 8 minute film.

The scene opens with close up shots of the girl with some slow piano music. Tracking shots of her feet and face are used, emphasising her supposed grace and beauty respectively. The lighting is almost entirely from one direction, creating very solid, strong shadows. The camera is placed on the opposite side to the strongest light source, which creates an interesting silhouette effect. This is something we could consider doing, as interesting shadows are a staple of the film noir genre.

 In this shot, the girl jumping up cuts to the boy landing on his feet. This is an interesting take on parallel editing that is fairly simple to recreate, aside from timing issues. The music also changes on this cut.

 The next cut is in time with the loudest drum beats of the music. This is very effecting in maintaining tension as it fits the tone of the music. In this shot, it starts with an empty frame, which the actor's hands then enter. This hints towards him just arriving, and is effective at maintaining visual interest.

In this shot, a smart phone is shown. This, along with some of the costumes, makes it very obvious that this film opening is set in modern day. I don't think this works well with the monochrome filter. It creates this strange dissonance, but I don't think that could have been easily avoided.

This is another interesting use of lighting. The silhouette effect here is very striking and I think something like this could work very well in our piece.

There are some other critique points I would mention. Firstly, due to the length of the piece, several music tracks were used. If it were edited well enough, that would not have been so jarringly obvious. The transitions between the audio tracks could definitely use some work, perhaps having longer fade outs would help. Secondly, the tracking shots were, for the most part, very shaky, with a few exceptions. This was more noticeable due to the abundance of them in this particular clip.

The strengths were definitely the lighting and variety of shots. The lighting was very harsh and effective in the indoor scenes. There were several interesting camera angles which I noted above.