The first question I asked was 'What is your favourite neo-noir film?', many people were unsure were what that meant at first- but as soon as I explained that 'Sin City' came under the genre, they immediately chose that- as it is an immensely popular film. This tells me that it is extremely important that we try and take inspiration from Sin City wherever we can, as it is adored by so many people- and the main purpose of films are to entertain the masses.
I changed my next few questions slightly, though two people had seen Momento- and chose that to be their favourite, I focused the next question solely on Sin City in a big to receive better answers. Now, I knew people liked Sin City, the next step was finding out why, and what part of the opening scene drew them into the film. The choices were dialogue, camera/editing, costume and effects- and it was dialogue and effects that came out top. As I have already gone into Sin City on my blog before (in depth analysis of the opening sequence coming shortly), the opening scene features a stylized, high contrast black and white effect and some dark and confusing dialogue!
Though people had now told me that they liked the effect of Sin City, which uses black and white- I wanted to see what else they would like, and here- I got rather varied results. The majority of people would prefer to see my film shot in black and white, with a b&w/colour mixture coming in second. This was quite interesting as in our original planning, we had never really thought about having a combination of colouring effects like that. This has changed my mind slightly, as even though the top result was black and white- and we have already edited our film in black and white, it would be silly to ignore the close second result.
I then asked about the two main characters in Film Noir, the 'femme fatale' and the 'protagonist'. So far we had introduced them right away, complete with dialogue- but it was important we found out if that was what the audience wanted while there's still time to change it!
I have learnt many things from just asking people from an Internet forum questions, although it would have been easier to ask my classmates- many of them aren't yet in the demographic for film noir yet, and many are unsure what film noir even means. However, I am pleased with the format I used because I received a mixture of ages and lifestyles to answer my questions. It is painfully obvious that Sin City needs to be a big inspiration to our project, and although we are coming to the end of it now- whenever a connection can be made to it, we need to go for it. However, we don't meet the protagonist and femme fatale so early in Sin City, because it features an ensemble cast and not a distinct partnership- but our audience feel that it's extremely important that they are introduced in the opening sequence.
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