Location shots

Here are some location shots of the interior and exterior of Clark and Martha McCaine's house. The first image is of the kitchen, which can be seen in Scene two of Blackmail, where Clark And Martha are first seen together. We chose to use this location as it was easy and accessible as it was Jess' house. Also because it had a 1950's feel to it, putting aside the modern appliances you can see such as the dishwasher etc.
The stairs in Clark and Martha's house are used when Clark is rushing down them and off to work, and he drops the article about Nancy onto the floor, where Martha discovers this. Again we used Jess' house as it was a good location but also had that 1950's feel that was required for the scene. The camera angle we used also works very well with the shape of the stairs, as we can get a very low angle looking up at Clark rushing down the stairs. As you can see in the image on the left and the image of the door up at the top, we used a low angle shot to capture this scene. It was very hard to find an old 1950's looking door, so we did struggle there. But overall I thought this shot and location worked quite well.

Here is a location shot which features in one of the last scenes of the film, when Nancy goes to visit Martha at hers and Clark's home. This was shot in my living room as there are venetian blinds in the living room. Venetian blinds are also a very recognizable convention in any film noir film, so we used them to our advantage on this sunny day. And as you can see on the floor of the living room, the light is peering through. This is also one of my favourite location shots in Blackmail as I feel the venetian blinds are such an important convention of the film, and as you watch the film you will see that the blinds work very well. The venetian blinds also created this very mysterious atmosphere for the scene, and made it very tense and fun to film, but also watch.

The images on the right are the location shots for Nancy's house, which is firstly visited in scene four by Clark. We chose this set location as it was close by, but also because it works well with the other location shots, and can be seen as a slight contrast to Clark and Martha's house. By this I mean Nancy who is the celebrity has a house which is slightly more modern for the era that they were living in. The driveway was also very spacious, and this worked especially well as the scene where Clark was going to Nancy's house with Martha following close behind had to have a lot of room, as the camera angle was a long shot. This was needed in order to capture everyone in the whole scene. For Nancy's living room we used Beth's house as the location for it, again it was ideal as everything was pretty much where it needed to be. Especially the window next to the sofa, where Martha is seen to spy on both Clark and Nancy. We also have a nice depth of field shot, as we can see straight through the window and further on. This is very typical of a film noir, and this follows the conventions of a typical 1950's film.

 Lastly here is the location of Clark's office. We used an English office at our school for this shot, and we felt it worked quite well. The only thing we had to do was move modern day technology, such as the computer and telephone and we re-kitted it with our own personal stuff. This scene is featured in Scene two and also when Nancy comes to visit Clark in the later scenes. It also works well, as the blinds behind the desk shows a long pathway outside, we used this to our advantage when filming as it worked well as it showed us a nice long shot, very typical   convention of a film noir.

Here are the three character's in Clarks office, but behind you can just about see the long shot that I just mentioned. The only struggle we had with this location was the fact it was such a tiny and isolated room. It was very hard to move around in and took some time to get used to, especially with a camera and tripod.