Similar films

Films Similar to Ours

Snatch, 2000

Particularly the scene in which 2 incompetent robbers choose to steal from a bookmakers, is akin to the intended first scene of our story, in which an inept criminal attempts to steal from a corner shop with disastrous consequences. The shopkeeper refuses to hand over the money at first but when she eventually does so, the robber leaves the money behind. This film scene is similar as it shows a botched robbery, extremely similar to the one that is planned for the initial scene in our film production.

 

The Italian Job, 1969

Due to the detailed nature of Michael Caine's planning, his maticulous nature is something that can be used within our film. The 'experienced' robbers within our film could plan out the end heist with scary levels of detail, in a similar fashion to that which takes place within 'The Italian Job'.

Pickpocket, 1959

The main character of this film is a pickpocket and thus throughout the course of the film, he engages in numerous acts of criminal activity. During a 'montage' within our film, the main character is seen pickpocketing as a means of training in crime, and thus this movie acts as a source of inspiration.

The History of Crime Films

History of Crime films

Crime stories in this genre often highlight the life of a crime figure or a crime's victim(s). Or they glorify the rise and fall of a particular criminal(s), gang, bank robber, murderer or lawbreakers in personal power struggles or conflict with law and order figures, an underling or competitive colleague, or a rival gang. Headline-grabbing situations, real-life gangsters, or crime reports have often been used in crime films. Gangster/crime films are usually set in large, crowded cities, to provide a view of the secret world of the criminal: dark nightclubs or streets with lurid neon signs, fast cars, sleazy bars, contraband, seedy living quarters or rooming houses and piles of cash. Exotic locales for crimes often add an element of adventure and wealth. Writers dreamed up appropriate gangland jargon for the tales, such as "tommy guns" or "molls."

Criminal/gangster films are one of the most enduring and popular film genres. They date back to the early days of film during the silent era. In fact, even Edwin S. Porter's silent short western The Great Train Robbery (1903) has often considered a classic hold-up story and chase film - a movie about crime.

Perhaps the earliest 'crime' film was Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), a 45 seconds long short (released in 1903) that was shown one-person at a time in hand-cranked Mutoscope machines or nickelodeons in amusement arcades. It was also the earliest known film featuring Sherlock Holmes. The plot was about how the famed Arthur Conan Doyle detective, a cigar-smoking gentleman, was 'baffled' when a black-clothed thief magically disappeared (through trick-photography) with a sack of stolen goods. Also, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1905), released by Vitagraph (although now a lost film) has been considered the first Sherlock Holmes film since it was created for a theatrical audience rather than as a one-person Mutoscope production.

One of the first films to officially mark the start of the gangster/crime genre was D. W. Griffith's The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) about organized crime. It wasn't the first gangster movie ever made, but it was the first significant gangster film that has survived. Outdoor scenes were shot in the gangland territory of NYC's Lower East Side with its slum tenements, and cast members included possible gang members. The story was about a poor, virtuous, and vulnerable Little Lady (Lillian Gish) who was threatened, victimized and terrorized by Snapper Kid (Elmer Booth) - the gangster leader of a gang known as the Musketeers.

Scarface: The Shame of a Nation (1932), directed by Howard Hawks, a Howard Hughes' produced film from UA, starred Paul Muni as a power-mad, vicious, immature and beastly hood in Prohibition-Era Chicago (the characterization of Tony Camonte was loosely based on the brutal, murderous racketeer Al Capone). Other stars were George Raft (as his coin-flipping emotion-less, right-hand killer) and Ann Dvorak (as Tony's incestuous sister Cesca).

Timeline of the History of Crime Films

1903: The Great Train Robbery
American short silent film shot with a budget of $150. Bandits break into a railroad telegraph office and force the operator at gunpoint to stop a train. Once it is stopped, the criminals steal from the train and flee with the stolen possessions.

1941: High Sierra

A heist film and film noir. A crime boss hire his former 'employee', a notorious thief, recently released from prison, to help a group of inexperienced criminals plan and carry out the robbery of a California resort. 

1960: Ocean's 11 

Danny Ocean gathers a group of his World War II compatriots to pull off the ultimate Las Vegas heist. Together the eleven friends plan to rob five Las Vegas casinos in one night. 

1969: The Italian Job

A cockney criminal, recently released from prison plans to steal a gold shipment from Turin by creating a traffic jam.

1973: The Sting

In Chicago in September 1936, a young con man seeking revenge for his murdered partner teams up with a master of the big con to win a fortune from a criminal banker. 

1991: Point Break

An FBI agent goes undercover to catch a gang of surfers who may be bank robbers. 

2000: Snatch

Unscrupulous boxing promoters, violent bookmakers, a Russian gangster, incompetent amateur robbers, and supposedly Jewish jewellers fight to track down a priceless stolen diamond. 

Film Mood Board

First 3 minutes

Project Conspicum: first 3 minutes

The beginning of the film starts with a zoom-in through an alley way for 3 seconds. Afterwards, the Camera pans between a young girl playing across the streets, and a close up of a wheel of a speeding car. After a few pans, progressively getting faster, but not too fast, the protagonist and a bunch of his friends come into view, the protagonist turns left into the same alley way, and the friends leave and say good bye.

After a few steps through the alley way, he stops, a crane shot beside him from his feet to his narrowing eyes. The camera creates 2 track-in zoom-out shots; one down the alley way, the other focusing on the protagonist. Dead silent, the camera looks down the alley way. The moment he hears the car going down the road, he brings out his arms and makes a “frame” with his hands. His eyes turn an unusual blue, and flame-like energy makes the line of the frame. As his hands part in surprising fashion, he zooms down the alley way at unusual speeds, the background zooming back (like light-speed in star wars).

The camera goes to a long shot of the car about to hit the girl, and the protagonist teleports in to save the girl, pushing her back onto the pavement, at the risk of falling over too. The girl says thanks and leaves as if nothing happened, making the protagonist roll onto his back with a rather disappointing face, having saved a life and got nothing out of it. A shadow looms over him, it’s his side kick of the film. They have a bit of a humorous conversation with each other, until the protagonist gets serious and asks for any leads. The side-kick pulls out a image from his pocket and showed a coloured photograph of a man doing the police mug-shot, explaining that his conspicum powers had caused untraceable incidences in the local area, thinking he’d be a good source of evidence about the antagonist. The protagonist gets back up and they start to walk down the street, continuing their humorous conversation, the camera pans towards the sky, and the Logo could be seen edited into the sky. The sky fades to black, and the logo shifts to the side, letting in room for the title that pans right. Any filter time is shown as presenting the makers and contributors of the film (AKA Trident Pictures)

Film Mood Board

Film Idea

Film Idea: “Project Conspicum”

(Action adventure, super hero film which focuses on how the camera film techniques could be used as super powers, Rating 15)

(NOTE: “Conspicum (Con/Spik/Yoo/Umm)” is a literal translation of “Perspective”)

Centuries ago, an extra-terrestrial anomaly had arrived in young planet Earth, landing somewhere in what was to be Russia. This Object unleashed powers like no-other across the Globe, giving many different life-forms “Conspicum Power”, the power to uniquely bend space around them to their whim. As the asteroid hit the earth, the Alien mass was covered deep into the earth’s crust.

Later now, in the present, the Object had been dug up, and its presence emitted across the planet once again, this time targeting selected members of the dominating species: the human race. We come to our protagonist, who has been reported randomly teleporting out of control, some quoting this as “blinking” and “jump-cutting”. After a series (potential montage) of clues scattered around his life, they lead him to an underground base surrounded by other people with punk-like outfits (not to the point of depressing to look at) and they all have similar conspicum powers, one of them, later to be side kick, has the abilities to push objects on a radius, called “PAN” (the ability, not the person).

After a few leads on names that they have tracked down, they locate an antagonist who holds the alien artefact, planning to use the item to build civilizations from the ground, and to destroy any that may interfere. They encounter a foe with a really powerful conspicum ability. They get past him, but at the cost of some reflective injuries, and go on to do a training montage, finding unique ways of using their powers.

Near the end, the group locates and intrudes the antagonist’s hide out, Beating their way out goons and traps. They get to the centre, and the artefact is securely locked away. The Antagonist and Protagonist fight, and to less exposure of the artefact, they lose their conspicum powers and resort to fist fighting instead. Seeing as the antagonist begins to lose, he tries releasing the artefact once more, more powerful than ever to be so close to the artefact. These powers quickly fade, as one sniper rifle shot breaks the artefact, losing its glowing colour and shatters into a million pieces. The antagonist, and even the protagonist and his group, gets caught by the police, FBI, and whoever else is involved, and had them reported to jail for trailing dangerous people with bizarre powers. After a few jury decisions, the Protagonist leaves, but promises to get them back out soon enough.

Mood Board

Film Continuity

Film Continuity:

Continuity, by definition, is “the maintenance of continuous action and self-consistent detail in the various scenes of a film or broadcast”, and in film photography, we keep this self-consistent detail though means of theories and methods that films use over and over again, some of the more popular ones are 180 degree rule, match on action, and Shot-reverse shot.

180 Degree Rule:

The 180 degree rule in film photography usually happens when one actor talks to another actor in the film. To follow Continuity, the theory is that when the audiences watch the actors talk, their eyes follow a pattern between the 2 actors: here, we see that actor 1 is always to the left hand side of the camera when the film is playing, and Actor 2 on the right. This tells the audience that when the camera edits to the next actor, their eyes switch to look at the opposite side of the film, associating that side of the shot with that/those specific actor(s). The continuity breaks hard when the angle of the camera switches sides of the 180 axis that pass between the 2 actors. This is considered “Crossing the line”, and it doesn’t look, or even feel, right when the audience watches the scene. The rule is simple; angle the camera in any direction you want, just don’t let it pass the 180 axis that pass through the 2 actors, like an invisible wall.

Match on Action:

Within film photography, “Match on Action” is when an action starting from the first cut swiftly translates into the second cut and continues it forward. This can be described as someone running out of the shot of the camera, which then moves to the second cut as the camera films the actor running in front of it, running in the same direction the camera was facing. This method is mostly used to avoid panning where the camera cannot pan to, such as the camera facing the same corner of a building but on different sides of the building.  However, when using Match on Action, it’s important to know when you’re going to edit and which positions the actor is in: this can destroy continuity to, for example, end with the left leg in the end of the first cut and then start with the right in the second cut.

Shot-Reverse Shot:

The Shot-Reverse Shot is a continuity editing technique used in conversations or simply characters looking at each other or objects. A shot showing what the character is supposedly looking at (either a point of view or over the shoulder shot) is followed by a reverse angle shot of the character themselves looking at it, or of the other character looking back at them, for example. This is often mistaken for the 180 degree rule, the difference is that the way the camera switches between characters are at a fixed angle, so it doesn’t vary as much as the 180 degree rule.

First Three Minutes of my Film

The first three minutes will consist of the opening titles and screen. The the DCI and DI will arrive at the scene of the murder and find the police chief dead on the floor murdered and his wife is stood over his body crying with blood on her hands. They will then begin to search the house for evidence and inspect the bod and send it for and autopsy. The will then head back to the police station to start to create a case starting with people he knew and could cross reference those people with the numbers/contacts on his phone and they would try to see who had the motive to kill him. They will start to look through the phone and in particular the call history where they find calls from multiple unknown numbers and when they try to call it back to trace the number there is no answer so they take this as their main lead and they begin to investigate further into who it could d be and why they murdered the police chief.

Film Idea

My film would be a murder mystery where the chief of police would be murdered at the begging of the film and the rest of the film would be about finding out who did it and it will take the characters on a physical and psychological journey. From the moment the murder happens the wife of the police chief starts to gets mysterious texts from a random number and is harassed by the potential murderer asking for money in return for he safety. It will be up to the police to out who this is and who committed the murder, the police in charge of the investigation would be the DCI and DI and they would try and find out who killed the police chief. They would go to a series of locations to try and find clues which would lead them to different suspect and would get close to prosecuting a lead but then they will find new evidence that says it is someone else until eventually they are confronted by the murderer face to face. who could to be? The characters will have their own suspicions as to who it was and will eventually put all the evidence together to find that it was the DI who did it because his brother was murdered and the police chief was in charge of the investigation and they did nothing  to try and find who did it so in revenge the DI took the police chiefs life.

Continuity Editing

Shot/Reverse shot

• Two shots edited together that alternate characters, typically in a conversation situation. Usually characters in one frame look left, and in the following frame look right
• It may not be filmed in the correct order but will be edited together afterwards
• Must ensure that the right amount of shots are filmed to make the 'shot reverse-shot sequence work:
• Film it once with a 'master shot' which shows both characters.
• Film it again with the camera in a closeup on one character.
• Film it again with the camera in a closeup on the second character

180° rule

• The angle between any two consecutive shots should not exceed 180°, in order to maintain spatial relationships between people and objects in any give sequence of shots.

Match on action

• A cut between two shots that places two different framings of the same action next to each other making it seem to continue uninterrupted.

Initial Film Idea Start to End

Genre: Crime

Beginning
The scene would open in a corner shop/ post office, something like that in which the shop assistant is just chewing gum in an otherwise empty shop, something to signify that she [the shopkeeper] is cocky.

As the shop is quiet and boring, a robber, dressed as expected, balaclava, black clothing etc. bursts in with a knife and screams various profanities to the shopkeeper in order to intimidate- holding the weapon towards him/her whilst she loads money into a carrier bag provided. As soon as the money is placed in the bag and given back to the robber, he scurries out of the shop and runs into a dark area/ getaway car in which two other people are already located. The robber removes his mask and asks “did I do alright?” or something along those lines, a cut is made to the disappointed faces of his two accomplices which is then followed by a camera cut to the outside of the car/ dark area showing a trail of money as to where the bag has split, probably follow this up with “fuck” or “shit”.

Then cut to the title of the film.

Middle
The three criminals discussing what went wrong and how this needs to be avoided in the future. The 2 ‘senior’ robbers are basically lambasting this other bloke for being an amateur and a failure, all that sort of stuff.

Basically, as of then the story is that these two criminals are going to teach this new kid how to rob places, he’s given “trial runs” at other shops, pick-pocketing, shoplifting, that sort of thing. They’re masters of all criminal activity and he’s showing promise, getting better, maybe show montages of him pickpocketing or stealing food from shops or committing armed robberies or muggings.

Ending
All 3 of the criminals decide they want to do a big heist, a bank most likely. They decide they’re all ready for it and get blueprints of the bank draw up plans on notice boards, they meet up with blokes who get them guns, explosives, all the necessary things for a bank heist until they eventually go into the bank, start demanding money when police sirens are heard not long after entering the bank. The camera would cut the outside of the bank and “fuck” or “shit” would be said alluding to a previous point in the film, signalling the end.

Preliminary Exercise

Continuity

Film continuity refers to the consistency of different plot devices, people and outfits amongst other things over a period of time.

180° Line of Action
When filming takes place on only one side of a 180° axis in which typically two actors are situated. This way of filming ensures actor 1 is on the stage left of actor 2 and vice versa. Breaking this rule and choosing to cross the axis is referred to as ‘shooting in the round’. The 180° Line of Action refers to the imaginary axis in which the actors are situated.

Shot-reverse-shot
This refers to when one character is shown to be looking at another character, one who is typically off-screen, whilst the other character is shown to be looking back at the original character in order to simulate the ideology that the two characters are looking at each other.

Match on action
Referring to video editing techniques in which the editor cuts from one scene to another yet the two actions of characters within that seen are relevant to each other. An example of this would be a scene in which a character turns a doorknob and a transition to another scene takes place in which the door opens from the other side. The shot of the initial scene is directly related to the subsequent one.

Short Film Introductions

Idea 1
   An opening credit sequence picturing old, grainy footage of IRA broadcasts on 1970s-esque television equipment. Cast and crew’s names appear in the bottom left corner whilst eventually the film’s title appears on one of the monitors, which then fades to black.

   The initial scene fades in from this blackout to show the corner of a room; the camera pans diagonally, upwards to the left to reveal a stereo-typically looking (and talking) Irish man being sat behind a desk whilst a British Police Officer interrogates him.

   Dialogue routinely consists of the policeman asking whether the Irishman knows of an attack somewhere within England, say near London or any other major city on some date in or around 1973, to which the Irish bloke will reply generic stuff, “I don’t know nutting”, “Don’t know what you’re talking about”, “No comment”, etc. He is essentially trying to absolve himself of all blame and distance himself from the attack.

    The officer becomes more and more frustrated, raises his voice towards the suspect. Close up: The policeman’s angry face to show the anger he possesses, then possibly cut to a close up of the Irish bloke, smirking, laughing maybe to show the contrast of emotions, the Ireland-er can say a quip like “Can I go now?” which will then cut to a scene of him exiting the police station.

Idea 2

  The scene would open in a corner shop/ post office, something like that in which the shop assistant will be talking with a customer, these two will not necessarily have to have their faces on camera as it is not essential to the story.

Midway through there tedious conversation a robber, dressed as expected, balaclava, black clothing etc. bursts in with a knife and screams various profanities to the shopkeeper in order to intimidate- holding the weapon towards him/her whilst (s)he loads money into a carrier bag provided. As soon as the money is placed in the bag and given back to the robber, he scurries out of the shop and runs into a dark area/ getaway car in which two other people are already located. The robber removes his mask and asks “did I do alright?” or something along those lines, a cut is made to the disappointed faces of his two accomplices which is then followed by a camera cut to the outside of the car/ dark area showing a trail of money as to where the bag has split, probably follow this up with “fuck” or “shit”.

Group Photo