Mise En Scene Blog Post

 The goals of our Mise En Scene project was to create various elements from a character description and bring it to life.We were primarily tasked to focus on three main elements: physical representation, setting, and audio. For the physical representation category, we had to design our characters appearance, costuming, and makeup. The setting had to compose of our characters bedroom or most utilized space, while the audio had to be music or stings that could be tied to the character. Once we created all our elements, we were tasked with creating 4 stations to represent them. Each should depict a different aspect of her life and include various types of representations like tactile, visual, and auditory.

Our characters name was Ivy Carrington, a college student who fought for what she believed in: saving her planet. Ivy was a young earth activist who studied environmental science in her college, the university of California. In her day to day life, she is very committed to her activism about her climate. She often organizes various rallies, leading in most, at her school. Her home life was also very social since she lived in an apartment with her 3 best friends 5 minutes away from her campus. Overall, Ivy is a very outgoing and social girl.

For our physical representation, we used a Canva board to illustrate her main physical features like her hair, favorite color, and typical clothing. This was apart of our visual representation of Ivy, and was one of the main stations we incorporated. The slide also had a lengthy textual description of our character, providing context and necessary information to our readers. To help illustrate her setting, we utilized a 3D software called Planner5D. Essentially, we built a room for Ivy and displayed it as an interactive station in our project. Our auditory components consisted of songs that represented Ivy. This included things like: songs she would study to, songs to empower herself, and her favorite songs in general. We embedded these directly into a Canva slide, where the audience could click to play their songs. This was also displayed on a separate station for people to engage with. Our tactile representation was a poster, which represented one of the posters that Ivy would bring to a rally. Combining all of these elements, we were able to properly convey Ivy's personality traits.

When developing these components, my group first started to come up with Ivy's main features. This included coming up with her setting and its related elements, and putting it into writing. We also made all her physical features on the same document as well. Through this, it became much easier for us to divide up the work amongst ourselves. After we divided it, each member knew what they had to include in their representation and had a general idea of how to do it. Overall, I am very happy with how the project turned out. Personally I think each of the 4 stations ended up perfectly and accurately represented my character, Ivy Carrington.

Character Description Page: 

Link To Project: 

Ivy Carrington

Genre Research Activity

 Genre: Suspense

Conventions: Suspense consists of many dramatic elements which are portrayed through careful cinematic choices. It aims to build uncertainty, tension, and anxiety in the viewers. It allows the audience to know that something will happen, but not know what it is. Suspense usually creates a conflict or a threat, which creates that "edge of your seat" feeling in it's audience. It then follows up on this by building on events that lead up to the climax, where the suspense is broken. Once that tension releases, the viewers get a thrilling feeling; this is one of the main points of suspense.

Genre Conventions: Given the information on what suspense is, there are careful techniques used to build suspense and give the audience the thrill they are hunting for. One of the main techniques utilized is the lighting. Suspense films use darker themes and lower lighting to create that anxious feeling in it's viewers. While it is similar to horror, it is very different in it's goal. The lighting aims to create these feelings through mystery, not fear. Additionally, a vast multitude of camera techniques are also employed in suspense pieces. Things like low angle shots, POV shots, and the use of handheld shots are all commonly utilized in these films. Low angle shots are used to make characters or situations feel more threatening. POV shots are used to put the audience directly in the characters situation as a way of emersion. Handheld shots are used for realism, which are an excellent technique to build these anxious feelings in audiences since it is the most impactful

The Blair Witch Project utilizes handheld shots throughout to create a sense of realism and emersion in the audience

Institutional Conventions: Marketing a suspense film has various core elements that define the genre. The goal is to tease, not reveal. This technique creates that sense of mystery just through viewing something like a poster, or a trailer. They aim to build anticipation in the audience since creating that anxious feeling in the audience directly correlates to more views on the film. Adding on to this, they also aim to create questions in the audience, which would draw more attention to the film.

Without spoiling, one could easily argue the film "Get Out" is a prime example of a suspense movie. From the first scene, it creates a sense of wrongness in the audience and builds on this scene throughout. This gives us the anxious feeling that things are not what they seem, which is a prime example of a suspense. It also uses darker colors throughout the film, as well as dramatic sounds, and stings. It also uses close ups and tight close ups to highlight the emotion of the characters, while directly transmitting it to the audience. The producers also carefully use sound as a tool to build suspense throughout the film. Specifically, they use silence to create an awkward feeling which also builds tension in the audience.

Also without spoiling, many would agree that the series "You" uses various techniques to efficiently create a suspenseful piece. The series revolves around a stalker, someone who lurks in the shadows, quietly watching and waiting. Consequently, the series follows the stalker as he maneuvers around his life, hiding his identity, and his existence as a whole. This creates suspense as the audience is constantly on the edge of their seat, anxiously waiting to see if the stalker will be caught or not. 

Some Other Suspense Pieces:

Ozark

Dexter

Prison Break

Breaking Bad

The Platform

Sound

 During our sound lesson, we were taught various different techniques pertaining to how to tell a story through our soundscapes. We learned about multiple sound related vocabulary as well. This included: synchronous sound, sounds that are synchronized with what the viewer is seeing; asynchronous sound, sounds that are not present on the screen; diegetic sound, sound that is in the narrative world with no relation to being on screen or off screen; and non-diegetic sound, sound that does not belong in the characters world or story. These provided guidelines for the following projects we would be assigned to do. 

In the first project, Sound Project #1, our objective was to tell a story using only sound. Our story had to be something that could take place naturally in a 1–2-minute span; however, we were given full creative freedom over the actual plot. We were provided with online databases to gather our audio from and used Microsoft’s ClipChamp to put it all together. Using the knowledge and experience we gained from Sound Project #1, in our second project, we were tasked with adding an entire soundscape to our previous project, the One Word Film Project. In both projects, we were tasked with the creation of multiple Foley sounds. These sounds had to be made by us using real world objects to create sound effects that we captured in Clipchamp. 

To begin both projects, me and my partners made a brainstorming sheet to plan out what "scenes" we would be including in our sound project. During brainstorming, we made a list of sounds that would be expected in our soundscape, as well as the order they would come in. This helped us to find our sounds by just looking at the list of sounds and crossing them out. We used clip champ for both projects since it had many helpful features like detaching audio, splitting audio, etc. In the future, I would like to add more layers of sound to create a more realistic soundscape. However, I still do think we represented our scenes quite accurately given we could not use any visuals.

Links to both:

Sound Project #1: DixitBroderick_soundscape_per5.m4a  Sound Project #2: OWFSound_Broderick