Starting our film noir...

I chose to work with Dan Cowie on the film noir project as we had worked together previously on the music video task from last year. We worked well together to create a short music video and I knew working with him again would produce great results, which can be seen in the finished product. The first thing we did when planning our film was to come up with a story. We wanted to stick to the conventions of classic film noir films and have a story that contained a number of twists and turns but at the same time we wanted to keep it relatively simple as not to confuse the audience and distract from their enjoyment of the film. After considering many different ideas we decided to have a story about a journalist who takes on a high powered politician to uncover his corrupt ways and is seduced by the politician's wife along the way. We decided to go with this plotline as it stuck to the conventions of classic film noir yet challenged them at the same time. For example the plot contains corruption and seduction as well as a femme fatale yet replaces the high powered crime lord of typical film noir with a politician and the hard boiled private eye with an everyday normal journalist. We did this as we wanted to have a film that was recognisable to fans of the genre yet did something different in order to give a fresh look to the already popular style of film.

Having successfully coming up with a story and an outline for the plot the next step was to choose the title of the film. This step was somewhat harder than writing the story as we wanted a title that mirrored the plot and actions of the film while at the same time fit the conventions of classic film noir films. We came up with a list of possible titles and eliminated them one by one based on the suitability of them. The first title we choose to use was ‘Shadow Play’. We kept this title until halfway through filming since we had changed and adapted certain aspects of our film and felt that this title was no longer appropriate. We then decided to go with the title ‘Cracked Secrets’ as we found it to be far more suitable than the original working title. The next thing we had to do was write the screenplay. This would prove to be the longest and hardest part of the whole process as we wanted to make it just right. We went through several draft scenes before coming up with a finished screenplay.