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CREATIVE MEDIA PRODUCTION AND

TECHNOLOGY
LEVEL 3 EXTENDED DIPLOMA

Rotten Remains

By Harvey Smith and Oscar McRobbie

Date Issued: Tuesday 5th April 2022

Final Deadline: Friday 10th June 2022

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Information on competition:

The competition that Harvey and I ended up picking was The

Raindance Film Festival, as we found it to be the best suited
to our own ideals. For a start it’s one of the few film
festivals that are happening this year that we can submit to
(even though it costs £50), as well as having next to no
restrictions on genre and the content itself.

The 30th edition of the festival is occurring at some point

during Autumn 2022. The Late Deadline is the 13th June 2022,
three days after our project’s deadline. The films submitted
to Raindance must have been completed after the 1st January
2021.

Raindance Film Festival “specialises in first-time directors

and discovery”, which we very much are in many ways.

Provided that the film complies with the Academy rules, then
you can be eligible to receive nominations for awards from
Academy Awards ®.

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Outline of Final Idea:

Our final idea is a Neo-noir to put it simply. It’s actually a

noir film that takes heavy (and I do mean heavy) inspiration
from contemporary neo-noir films from the 1990s to the 2010s.

It’s about two detectives trying to track down and stop a

serial killer from committing another murder. It’s a race
against time, as the killer seems to always strike between the
average of 43 – 53 hours. On the way they’ll meet a plateau of
colourful characters, all of whom could be suspects – though
there’s only one real killer.

The resulting film is a slow build-up of tension as the two

detectives slowly try to solve the case (though it’s only
going to be roughly 15 – 20 minutes, so it won’t feel too slow
for the viewer).

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Rules and Regulations:

Looking at the Raindance “Rules and Regulations”, it’s quick

to notice that their rules are awfully scarce. They don’t
really have “rules” of the typical sense; besides the obvious
entry fee- which I don’t believe is a rule per se, but is
definitely a requirement if you want to get into the festival.

However, there are some rules, in the sense that they’re

requirements for what gets picked to be shown. If you don’t
abide by them, you won’t get picked.

The first rule is that it has to be of good production value -

which means it needs to utilize its budget effectively to
portray its story in the correct way without intending
mockery. Which we may have done before we started this section
of the course, but we fully intend to take ourselves as
seriously as we can, even if that does mean keeping the scope
lower than most high-budget productions.

The second rule is that it has to be from an independent

source - meaning that it can’t be backed by a major motion-
picture studio, it has to be independently sourced, from
individuals, not studios. I don’t think that Harvey and I will
ever receive studio backing for this production, as it is just
a student film made by two college students who have next to
no ties to the industry.

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The Target Audience:

While I feel that the noir / neo-noir genre can be enjoyed by

everyone, there is the fact that noir films are usually quite
gritty and dark (in both theme and presentation), so it’s
often the case that they’re not for the faint of heart and/or
children.

The classic noir of the 40s and 50s, while still being gritty
and dark, are hardly “violent” in the modern consensus of the
word. They’re intended for a broader audience (most likely due
to The Hays Code). Compare these types of films with neo-noir
films, which are far more contemporary and therefore go by
contemporary standards (meaning no Hays Code), this means they
can get away with much more than the classics could. If you
google neo-noir and look at the films; you’ll see that almost
all of their age ratings fall between 15-18 – but if you
search up noir, and look at the 50s section you’ll see that
the majority of the films are rated PG.

Due to this fact, and the fact that we’re taking majority of
our influence from neo-noir rather than classic noir, we’d
have to say that our target audience would be those 15 and
over, as we do intend for some graphic scenes (nothing too
graphic, but still graphic enough).

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Legal and Ethical issues:

Looking into plagiarism and copyright issues when it comes to

our film is quite difficult to step around. The fact is that
we intend to take inspiration from the noir and neo-noir. When
looking at those films you see that they have tropes and
cliches that are hard to avoid. Some of them are just
conventions which are fine- but others have deep rooted
connections to the film in which it appeared in.

It's the matter of “this film did this first; therefore, you
were plagiarizing it”, which Harvey and I fully agree that we
had no intent to plagiarize. We’ll try and steer clear of the
things that make specific movies what they are, and more focus
on noir as a whole.

A further issue we may face is the fact that we intend to film

the aftermaths of what murder looks like- some may find this
distressing and therefore not want to watch.

One final issue we may face is location filming. It is illegal

to film on private property without permission, as it counts
as trespassing. Harvey and I intend to use consent forms when
filming in private property, though most of our locations do
happen to be public property, so this issue will only crop up
for a few of our scenes.

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Production Schedule:

Date – Week Plan of Action Evaluation

beginning
4th April Proposal work The Weekly Blog
11th April Genre/Medium research The Weekly Blog
18th April Genre/Medium research The Weekly Blog
25th April Research into Evaluation of the
Contents/Target Audience research itself
2nd May Test Shooting/Auditions Test Shoots/ The
Weekly Blog
9th May Pre-production/ Planning
Scripting/Storyboards/Character evaluation
profiles
16th May Filming Production
evaluation
23rd May Filming/Editing The Weekly Blog
30th May Pitch preparation Self-evaluation
6th June Pitch/Evaluation Upload filmed
pitch
13th June Improvement day N/A

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