Research and Planning - Mise-en-scene Discussion

 Today I got into a general conversation about movies with my friends Matt and Vikky, which proved to be more interesting, thought provoking and useful than most of our other general conversations we usually have! When the genre of movie we were discussing moved on to the horror genre I told my friends that the horror genre was the genre of my media work and started to explain the media brief of making a film trailer, poster and magazine cover. Both Matt and Vikky are art students and Matt used to be a media student when he attended a different college, so they were very interested in my media work. I ended up showing them my blog and all my research and discussing with them what they liked best about the horror genre and what they associated with it - the typical things such as a red/black/white colour scheme, low key lighting, forests, creepy dark locations and graveyards came up which confirmed to me that my research and own thoughts on the genre were on track and the same as my friends'. As the conversation progressed we started talking about costumes, props, general mise-en-scene and in particular the make up and effects that would be necessary to make the dead character in the trailer really look dead and wounded. As art students they had learnt techniques with inks and mixed materials of how to create realistic wounds on drawings and sculptures, they then applied this knowledge to how to create a similar effect with make up, gels and skin putty.

When we were discussing possible filming locations, Vikky came up with the idea of rather than searching tirelessly to find the perfect place, find a suitable place and dress it up. For example, if I want a specific woodland area with a stream, bare trees and brown leaves on the ground and I can only find a location with a stream, green leaves and trees full of leaves, then I can take bags of collected brown leaves and twigs with me to the stream location, scatter the brown leaves in the appropriate place, then whilst filming get people to stand holding twigs at an appropriate distance in front of the camera to recreate the bare trees and make sure the camera shot doesn't include the full green trees, then I have effectively created the brown leaves, bare trees and stream location I had originally wanted - which I thought was genius !!

When telling Matt about the idea of having a scene where paint is scrawled across the wall to created a sinister message, he warned me that he had attempted something similar in his work and it had failed tragically because he hadn't prepared enough. He advised me to take far too many videos than are necessary of any scene that will contain the wall where the paint will end up before the paint is put on it, because if the wall becomes stained and takes ages to scrub the paint off after the painted scenes, then it will ruin the continuity of the wall being paint free if a scene including the paint free wall needs to be re-shot. He also advised to run through the scene involving the paint as many times as it takes for the cast and crew to know EXACTLY what they are doing, as once the paint goes on the wall there will only be a limited time to film the scenes involving the paint before it runs, drips, deforms or dries into an undesirable shape.

I really found this conversation with my friends incredibly useful !!