Practical Task - Location

Location Scouting

I began by searching for images of typical film noir scenery. Many of the films are set in large cities such as London and New York, including scenes by busy roads, high rise offices and backstreet alleyways. Living in rural Kent, it would be inconvenient to have to travel to London every time we needed to film and also very expensive, so I decided to use locations closer to home. I was inspired by these pictures of alleyways:

Though not being quite as city-like as these, I knew I had several alleyways near my house so I decided to photograph these and edit them to make them more old looking. Below is an example of one of my pictures before adding effects.

To make the images look old and dated I followed the same tutorial I used in my previous Photoshop experiment, and I used some tips from this site to make the images darker and less bright as I took them during the middle of the day. I used a curves adjustment layer to give it a very subtle blue tint and to darken the shadows. Here a screenshot of all the layers I used. 

  

I created groups for the layers which made it easier to distinguish between what effect each layer was contributing to, and I also made a group to cover all effects so I could simply drag the whole folder to my other pictures to apply the same effect. I also used this texture which I have used previously when investigating props. 

Here are the images I have taken of alleyways.

 

I think if we were to include some kind of chase scene in our film, these would be very effective to use, for example we could use a handheld camera to run down them to build tension. They would also be effective places for two characters to meet inconspicuously without anyone finding out.

I also took a couple of pictures of the garages behind my house as it's a big, open space which could be useful for a fight scene, and the doors of the garages are slightly old and worn which gives it an industrial feel.

Overall, I think the locations I found could come in handy for parts of our production. However, I think we would need to look farther afield to find more locations that look more inner city-like as there weren't really any places accessible to me at home that looked truly film-noir. I also need to look more at filters as many of the film noir pictures are much darker and have a greater contrast between highlights and shadows; on this occasion I am not particularly pleased with the colouring of my pictures.