Mise en Scene exercise

In this blog I am going to be talking about mise en scene and the exercise I did with fellow class mates showing mise en scene. Mise en scene is all the conventions needed to make a good film or a video clip.



To begin with setting when filming something you need to think about your back ground for example if you are filming a jail scene and you shoot it in your house then it is not going to look like a believable back ground as everyone watching will know that this is not a jail. The settings in your film or video clips also needs to show what area it is based in for example if it is based in Texas or the south west of america it is going to give the audience more of an understanding of the stereo typical things around this area so they will automatically feel anxious due to this being a rather dangerous place. Going back to the jail setting for example if its a jail in America the audience are going to feel more tension and fear for the characters inside the jail compare to an England prison due to the fact its shown to be a lot more dangerous even though prison is a bad place overall.


Secondly lighting, lighting can represent the emotions that a character is feeling and gives of a much better effect in a film or video clip when you relate the lighting to the mood in the sequence. The lighting is done by the three point lighting this is key, fill and back light this gives of a deep depth of lighting which makes scenes shot at night time look more realistic however its not to deep to give it a proper dramatic shot. Then we have high key lighting, high key lighting is used by fill lighting this makes the scene appear bright and soft showing very few frame shadows. High lighting is normal used when filming comedies or musicals. Finally what i am going to talk about is low key lighting this is the complete opposite to high key lighting and gives of the complete opposite effect, this is when the filler light is at a very low level making the frame give of large shadows. Low key lighting is normal used to create tension and sometimes fear to the audience this is normally used in  thrillers, horrors and hood movies.


Props and costume is another Mise en scene convention this is all props and costumes needed to give the best effect to the audience, for example if your film was based in a school then the props needed would be to make your set look like a class room etc so you may have lockers, white boards, tables and chairs pens etc as props to show that you are in a school scene also costumes would come across depending on what country this is based on so if this is being shot in a school in England for costume the school characters will be wearing school uniform and be wearing back packs to show they are students also, the hair and make up they may use depending on what type of person the character is so a typical school girl may have her hair in bunches with no make up on. Props and costume mean a lot when it comes to filming as for this example when shooting school scenes the actors will acting as a teenager but its most likely that there really in their 20's so by using uniform as putting little make up on these characters makes them look a lot younger and this makes them being teenagers in the films way more believable. If we didn't have props and costumes it can be a lot more harder to guess who characters are suppose to be and without props the audience will not believe the film and will loose interest eventually.









This is the exercise we done for Mise En Scene. We used over the shoulder shots for the first time we  showed facial expressions and some body language to show how we was feeling and done a few medium shots. This helped us to see and try out Mise en scene and camera shots too get an idea on what shots and mise en scene will be best for when we make our thriller. This also helped on deciding what props and shots we would need in our thriller to make it more realistic and look more effective.