Genre Research

 Since we had the basis of what we wanted our film's genre to be, a mafia action-comedy, I did research into the genre conventions of action-comedies. I worked with the cinematographer of our group while researching since I found a lot of sources saying fast, sudden cuts are typical of this genre. 

I took inspiration from this video since I had in mind extreme close-up shots and sudden zoom ins to up intensity of scenes. While what we have in mind for our chess film doesn't involve fighting scenes for the time being, I still wanted to make sure our film has that feeling of high stress or anxiety when you watch it. 

During the class we were also reminded this was going to be a silent film. This means most, if not all of the interpretation of our film comes from our imagery. I researched genre conventions of silent films to check ways to create meaning in film without dialouge since a lot of this will come in post-production editing. I discovered multiple films including Nosferatu (linked below) that showed dialouge through cutting away from visual acting to text to show what the actor just said. This is typically what I think of silent film as, but I felt this would take all intensity away from our film.

I researched typical conventions of action and found myself looking at comic book panels where it's typical to have more than one shot on a page, making scenes seem quick and fast-moving even on paper. I think we can take inspiration from this and when I edit, I can add multiple shots split on the screen, just like a comic book panel. Since having multiple photos split on one page is a typical element of action comics, it automatically invokes this feeling in the audience.