Style and Tone

Because our film is mainly set on the streets of London at night, we felt noir would be the best style of film to try and emulate. An inspiration for us is the film 'The third man', which employs lots of chiaroscuro (high contrast, lots of shadows) throughout the film. Although the film has no colour, many stills refer directly to how we imagined our opening to look, especially the picture below.

This still is almost identical to how we wanted our final shot to look, a backlit, silhouetted male/female walking into an alleyway. Even the reflection of the pavement from recent rainfall is something we wanted to take advantage of because of the incredible effect it gave. This particular film is set in Allied-occupied Vienna, which means the set shown in the picture above is quite decrepit but still urban - shown through the buildings and roads.
We want to modernise the noir genre for our opening, replacing the old fashioned dress of 1930s-50s with urban street-wear shown in our 'costume ideas' post. Immediately this style will be modernised through the use of colour, we want to use vivid, saturated hues to show the vibrancy of life in London at night.

A film that has already modernised the noir style is Drive, by Nicolas Winding Refn in 2011.

Although this is a theatrical poster and not a film still, I thought it emulated well what we are trying to achieve in our opening. The use of bright lights from street lamps and car headlight in an otherwise black city is a different way of attempting chiaroscuro - using the contrasts in light and dark to convey modernity as well as an eerie feel.

The colour palette used in Drive is also useful for us because most Noir films are in black and white. In the film vibrant hues are used - especially blues, which is what we are trying to convey.

The title sequence of Drive almost exactly shows the urban theme we want to convey, with the crane shots of the city and empty shots of the roads from P.O.V as Ryan Gosling drives his car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDCt1V8T3To
(embedding has been disabled)

Although this as an opening sequence shows Ryan Gosling as isolated in his car in the dead of night in an empty city, and we want to show the chaotic nature of a night out in London - we feel like the colours and style of this film is something we really want to try to produce.