Making Of: Rumpelstiltskin Noir Photoshoot

Our group was tasked to create a storyboard of neo noir themed fairytale. We chose to retell the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. 

At first we decided on Red Riding Hood, but we changed our minds to do Rumpelstilskin. Mainly because the typical noir character types were easier to assign to the characters of Rumpelstilskin and the story also fit in very well with typical conventions. 

We changed the characters into the following.

• Daughter who is asked to spin gold / Everyman who is asked to make drugs.
• The king who demands the gold / A Mafia boss who is demanding drugs.
• Rumpelstilskin, a man who can spin gold / Rumpelstilskin a man who can make drugs. (Femme Fatale)
• Father of the daughter, who brags about her gold spinning skills / Everyman's friend, who boasts about his skills when it comes to producing drugs.

The original tale of Rumpelstilskin goes like this : The father goes to the king and tells him that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king therefore buys the daughter off the father and demands she starts making him gold. If she fails to do so, she will die. Distressed, the daughter begins to cry. Rumpelstilskin hears her cries and offer to help, if she gives him some of her jewellery. She agrees and he spins straw into gold. The king is pleased and asks the daughter to do it once again. Rumpelstilskin agrees to help again, if she gives him the rest of his jewellery. Once again the daughter agrees and the king is extremely pleased. He asks the daughter to do it once more. She begs Rumpelstilskin to help her once more. He agrees to, but only if he is given her first born child. Thinking that she'll never have a child or that Rumpelstilskin will forget, she agrees. The king is pleased once more and decides to marry the daughter. Many years later they have a child. To the daughters horror, Rumpelstilskin demands the child. The daughter refuses. Rumpelstilskin gives her no choice, but tells her if she guesses his name in three days he will go away. After three days, the daughter is distraught but has no choice. Rumpelstilskin starts to celebrate by cheering out his name. The daughter shouts out his name and Rumpelstilskin dies on the spot. The daughter, the king and their child live happily ever after.

We decided to change the plot several ways to give it a more noir feel to it. Instead of gold we replaced the desired product to drugs. Instead of a royal family we changed it to a Mafia ring. There are also no female characters in our plot.

Our story is also much more gritty. Instead of taking jewellery, Rumpelstilskin demands that the Everyman kills a man for him. He does so, and Rumpelstilskin makes the drugs. Instead of a royal marriage, the Mafia boss rewards the everyman with a large sum of cash. Angered that he would not be receiving any money, Rumpelstilskin demands he is given the money. Instead of a happy ending, we decided to go down the typical noir conventional road, and have a sad ending. Accepting that he wasn't going to get to keep the money, Rumpelstilskin would no longer help him, and that he had killed a man himself, our Everyman decides to kill himself. Rumpelstilskin then leaves with the money.

The actual storyboard will be put on this blog soon. We did this task to get a better understanding of what it is like to set up a noir themed film. Also we could experiment with camera angles and mise en scene before our continuity task, which we will be doing in the following week. All of this is in preparation for our final coursework piece, the opening to a noir film.