Blog 10- Mise en Scene

Detailed notes on planned mise-en-scene – setting/location, props, colour, costume and make-up (with images – photos of proposed locations/costume designs etc). For each part you should comment on how that element of the mise-en-scene contributes to the representation, targets the audience, reflects the genre and communicates the story and the ideas.

What is Mise en Scene?

Mise en Scene, translated to "placing on stage", is used to describe the design aspects of film or theatre production. When applied to film, mise en scene refers to anything that appears before the camera, for example, actors, set, costumes, props and lighting.

Planning our mise en scene:

Setting/ Location

We want our music video to be shot in woodland as this is common in Florence and the Machines personal videos. It is ideal as it is easy to find somewhere we can shoot and no booking or payments have to be made.

For the shots of the boy building the coffins, we are going to set up a room at college, preferably with a brick wall like a studio with lighting that will emphasise the shadows on the wall that we can also film.

Props

Essentially for our props, all we needed a Hammer, for the scenes where we wanted a 'mysterious' boy hammering/making his coffins. We also bought black vest tops for our dancers, however the cold weather conditions meant that they needed to wear cardigans etc, but we still managed to keep all of the clothing black, like we had planned.

Colour

We want the colours in our video to stay natural like the forest we filmed in. We edited the contrast on the camera to make it a little darker and the colours a bit richer but the greens and browns of the forest came through really well.

Costume and Makeup

For our costumes, we wanted Lucy who was playing Florence and all of the dancers to wear black. This is because the colour black connotes death, and seeing as the song is all about this topic and the building of coffins we thought that this would work effectively in our video. We let our dancers use their own makeup. One of our ideas was to make our dancers and main characters look aged towards the end of the film, to show a lifetime in a day. We experiemented with makeup to make our character look old.

We achieved this old look by covering Lucy's face in a white powder. We then used a grey/silver eye shadow to give the impression of bags under the eyes and liver spots. We then got Lucy to scrunch up her face in different ways, and where her face creased up, we used a brown eyeliner to fill in the creases and therefore give the impression of wrinkles. From a distance, the makeup looked quite effective but we decided to not use the old theme/ lifetime in a day idea as we didn't want our music video to get too complicated and confusing for anyone watching it.

Lighting

The lighting for the majority of filming will be natural lighting however we can adjust the shutter speed to let more or less light into the camera. When recording the hammering scenes, we will be relying on lamp light to give the room a natural looking glow that will emphasise the shadows.