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City That Never Sleeps (1953)  Crime, Drama, Film-Noir

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As you can see there is water bouncing up from the floor and off from the people, which could be quite difficult to imitate in motion.

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Dark alleyways and side streets are often seen and are a key convention in film noir.

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Clothing that is seen in film noir is generally very formal and more men often consists of fedoras, suits, shirt and tie and a jacket. This is what Clive is wearing in the blue screen footage, so he will fit the aesthetic perfectly.

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If I decide to do my idea inside rather than outside I could perhaps put in some light altered by window blinds. This is common in noir and looks effective when reflected on top of the subject.

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Rain is also something that I could put into the VFX composite as it will add even more atmosphere, however I would need to add rain 'specs' or drops to Clive and on the floor if I was to do that, along with puddles on the floor to make it look realistic. Otherwise it looks very two dimensional

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Smoke and mist makes the frame looking atmospheric and gives it depth. That is definitely something I want to use and will give the background much more depth and make it look less like a still image.

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Bars are usually seen in film noir, and they use neon looking signs that glow due to the darkness of the night, making them stand out.

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Lighting on the person in the frame varies from fairly exposed when inside to not very exposed to almost a silhouette when outside.

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Shadows and silhouettes are common themes with film noir, which I could incorporate in the background of my VFX composite as a silhouette which Clive could be looking towards in the horizon?

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Film Noir is known as 'black' film, because of its black and white colour aesthetic. You can see this in all of the photos on this mood board. I love how classy, eerie and (sometimes) foreshadowing and tense it looks.

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A Criterion Collection list of Roger Ebert's 141 "Great Movies" includes only two films noir- The Third Man and The Killing-yet the late great critic had quite a lot to say about the genre. In an interview with radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge, for example, Ebert described noir films as teaching their characters a lesson: "that they're weaker than they thought they were and they're capable of evil that they didn't think they could commit." His deeply philosophical discussion will draw you into the nihilistic abyss at the heart of noir. And yet many of his reviews of such films comment as much on surfaces as depths. For all their psychological brutality, noir films were nothing if not stylish.

Ebert's enthusiastic review of 2005 neo-noir Sin City, for example, calls it a movie "not about narrative but about style... a comic book brought to life and pumped with steroids." Ten years earlier, he wrote on the noir explosion of the mid-90s: "Not since its heyday (roughly from 1940 to 1955) has film noir been more popular than it is right now." Ebert's examples are such hyper-stylized films as Pulp Fiction, Exotica, Seven, and even Batman Forever, all of which gesture toward classical noir locations and costuming fetishes. And in our post yesterday on 25 timeless noir films, we quoted from another 1995 Ebert piece. This time he writes on classic noir characteristics, and brings together much of his thinking on the grim themes and louche stylistic mannerisms of the genre. Below, we have Ebert's ten essential comments, slightly abridged, on what "Film noir is..."

1. A French term meaning "black film," or film of the night.
2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
4. Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, "On top of everything else, I've been assigned to get through three packs today."
5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
6. For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs... high heels, red dresses, elbow length gloves, mixing drinks [...]
7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners [...]
8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feeling like they were.
9. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death.
10. The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

Be sure to see Ebert's full piece here. Ebert loved all things noir, including comic book films like and Batman Begins. One of his favorite neo-noirs was Leaving Las Vegas (perhaps in part due to his own acknowledged alcoholism). But as he avers in his radio interview and in book The Great Movies, perhaps his favorite classic noir film was , "a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade in film school." All the same, he writes, the film "lives on, haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir." Watch Edgar G. Ulmer's "ham-handed" yet unforgettable 1945 Detour above and learn more about the film in this previous post from Colin Marshall.
Related Content: 25 Noir Films That Will Stand the Test of Time: A List by "Noirchaelogist" Eddie Muller The Third Man: Film Noir Classic on YouTube Roger Ebert Talks Movingly About Losing and Re-Finding His Voice (TED 2011) The Two Roger Eberts: Emphatic Critic on TV; Incisive Reviewer in Print Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essential Characteristics of Noir Films

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A Criterion Collection list of Roger Ebert's 141 "Great Movies" includes only two films noir- The Third Man and The Killing-yet the late great critic had quite a lot to say about the genre.

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Kiss me deadly / Polibek smrti (Robert Aldrich, 1955) HD (English/Czech subs)

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Finally, Schrader says that the fourth element was the hard-boiled tradition. Writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain wrote many books that were eventually turned into film noir. What these authors and films have in common is a cynical and bleak outlook with a tough main character.

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It's "the weirdest great movie ever made", in critic Dave Kehr's words. The one in which Orson Welles plays a sailor with an overcooked Irish accent, and that ends with a shootout in a hall of mirrors. Now available in a digital restoration, The Lady from Shanghai was made when Welles was Hollywood's fallen golden boy.

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The mist adds atmosphere and depth, which I should consider for my VFX.

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This image uses cigarette smoke rather than ambient smoke. There is also a back light which amplifies the white in the smoke.

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This picture uses a lovely mist in the background to add depth.