For my final project, I knew I wanted to step out of bounds and construct a story around a genre I was not too familiar with. Instead of a more modern approach, I chose a character from the Film Noir scene. Humphrey Bogart was one of those guys who dominated crime/drama/gangster genre back in the early to mid 1900s. After viewing many scenes/clips from his numerous films, I knew I wanted to focus on him in that era. No one will ever fill his shoes, or the love connection he shared with Lauren Bacall (the two actually got married in real life, just after a year of meeting on set).
As far as the storyline goes, I did not really have one developed when I started. I just began downloading several clips from youtube and imported them into iMovie. From there, I started to cut different scenes, and slowly developed my story as I went along. The length of the video was not even on my radar, I just kept going with it until it seemed fitting to me.
The silent film idea just came naturally, so I muted all the audio in the clips. I was going back and forth from editing and writing the narration of the story in Word. Once that was complete, it was time to add some text here and there so the viewers could follow the story line with ease. I thought it would be a good idea to add some still images in between scenes, along with text to switch it up a bit. For the title and credits sequences, I found some real cool early 1900s font that fit perfect with the theme. Lastly, this story needed a soundtrack. I watched the three different scenes over and over until I finally decided which instrumentals to use for each. I wanted theme music that would capture the feeling of each individual scene, and I think I did a hell of a job on the selections.
All of the digital elements that were used for this final project were ones that I enjoyed creating over the semester. In my original post for “A Gangster & A Gentleman”, you will notice that besides the narration/text, I have added a video (which I edited) that plays along with the story, a soundtrack (audio) that fits the story wonderfully, some GIFs from scenes in the video in between the narration, and two movie posters I re-designed in Photoshop. I honestly had a blast working on this project, thanks for viewing.
