Genre

The genre of our piece was noir, this affected the way in which we wrote it because we had to set a moody, sullen atmosphere without any visuals. We researched film noir and watched a recent film noir called 'Sin City', we decided to follow general conventions of film noir such as storyline and the type of characters. We also used 1950s colloquial language to set the scene.

The genre 'film noir' uses shadows and dark shots to create a moody atmosphere and includes themes such as crime, murder, sex and lust. Our whole group happened to be interested in film noir so we researched some film noir texts that we enjoyed, including 'Sin City' and 'Twilight Zone'.

Sin City is a film about a morally bankrupt metropolis with themes such as murder, deceit, love and a storyline of a misanthropist on a mission to avenge the death of his one true love. This is similar to the storyline in Transgression of Justice searching for the killer of his partner.

Transgression is also similar to the film 'A Touch Of Evil' which is an Orson Welles film. The film includes many negative themes such as drugs, racism and murder juxtaposed to one outlandish good cop who will do anything for reparation, much like Justice in Transgression.

Twilight Zone is a radio drama in the style of film noir, we listened to it and decided we should construct our radio drama in a similar way to how the Twilight Zone is constructed by using similar cues and links.

We tried to impersonate the film noir style using only audio, this meant we had to develop ways to create audio that encouraged the listener to visualise what's happening and get deeply involved in the drama. We did this by using sound effects that represented themes and ideas generally used in film noir. To get a crime enthused atmosphere we used helicopter noises and sirens, and for the scene between Abbey and Sconer in the restaurant we used old sounding 50s jazz music reminiscent of film noir texts and other public atmosphere sound effects. We also used a main character as the narrator to make sure the audience were fully aware of what was going on and could feel the atmosphere, this isn't a common convention in radio drama but it is used sometimes and I feel it was very effective.
As we opted to base our radio drama on film noir texts we chose to follow the same narrative conventions. Typically, film noir characters include the police, a villain and a femme fatale, so we wrote these characters into our piece. The storyline of our radio drama also held typical film noir values as it was a crime mystery about a policeman looking for the murderer of his partner.
The location was important to the atmosphere of the piece so we decided to set Transgression in Detroit, which is typical of film noir texts because of the aesthetic factors such as tall buildings which cast mysterious shadows, the hustle and bustle of city life and long dark back alleys, also underground crime thrives in cities such as Detroit. Although we couldn't show the audience our classic film noir setting, we hoped just by knowing where it was set the audience's imaginations would prevail. We also used city sound effects to create a busy, city atmosphere.