Film Noir - Chosen Sub - Genre For Opening Sequence

Film Noir Conventions


Me and my peers have decided that our chosen sub genre of 'Crime' will be that of Film Noir. We all understand the main conventions of Film Noir and we thought it would be easy for us to define it and make a two minute opening sequence for this style.
We have to bare in mind all that Film Noir offers withins it's convention. One of which that we'd had to plan the lighting to establish that the opening sequence is a film noir. We would need a variety of low key lighting techniques and chiaroscuro lighting to pull off strong contrast with shadows during our sequence.
During Film Noir styled films there is heavy use of smoking, as we live in an era where smoking is not prohibited inside, we thought that using the studio's fog machine would be a good way of making the set look full of smoke and the impression of the actors smoking. 
Another thing we wanted to use was the use of non linear narrative. Many Film Noir's have a distinctive narrative where is usually starts at the end of the film and the protagonist tells the story through voice over and flashback. As we can't have that much dialogue during our opening sequence, we thought the convention of the voice over would be an advantage for our sequence. 
Costuming for Film Noir is an important factor as it sets the scene, we want a classic 40s feel so fedora hats and trench coats our key for our actors style to put that across to the audience so they understand the setting and time. For the femme fatale we would need to keep her looking glamourous and seductive to the audience again to put key points across on who she is and what her background is.
We are still playing about with story lines at this point and what conventions we need to include. The basic narrative of a Film Noir is that our protagonist is usually a P.I, Salesman (Insurance etc) or something else which lets him come across either something bad or allows for him to meet his downfall, which is generally the femme fatale. The Distraction then usually 'seduces' or disrupts the protagonist and leads him away from the centre to the margin.  Usually the story ends on a negative note but always with the bad guy getting locked away (and a majority of the time, our led protagonist as well).

Example Of An Opening Sequence

• Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944)

Here is the trailer for one of the films I looked at to help us with the planning of our opening sequence. The scene itself can be view here http://youtu.be/AAAXdj1E5Gc. All the key conventions I have looked at are established in this short clip and I feel we could use this scene as reference as we make our own opening sequence.