Mise-en-scene project

 Hellooo blog!

So, last week our teacher had us do a mise-en-scene project. A quick recap on what mise-en-scene means, it's the lights, set, costumes, props, etc. of a film or any sort of media creation. For example, in a musical like Mamma Mia you'd see Greek buildings, a beach, or the island as well as lighter colors, high-key lighting, the diary, Donna's overalls. You get it. 

Now the goal of the activity was to see if we truly understood mise-en-scene in the context of a specific character. Our teacher gave us a short character description and we had to create their entire life through a soundscape, mood board, presentation, tactile board, and set model. My character was a movie lover who enjoys social get togethers with friends, they write a movie blog on which they post critiques of popular movies. We chose her name as Cameron Lee and made her a USC student majoring in Film who posts on Letterboxd. My group created a model of her apartment, a model doll of her, a tactile board of things associated with her, a notebook she would use to write her reviews down before posting them, a mood board for her character, a soundscape of her daily life, and a presentation to tie it all together. 

We had to create stations after all was done to allow our fellow classmates to view our creation, each group had their own little area to setup. We used 4 laptops to allow for each seat at the station to be able to click through our Google Slides presentation found here: Mise-en-Scene slides. We set up the tactile board in the middle so every student at the station could feel it while watching our soundscape as they were directly tied together, students would watch the soundscape video which had words presented, such as "Touch the popcorn.", and the students would touch that certain item for the part they were on. We left the model of the doll standing next to some of the computers as to present her and we left the set model on the desks that the doll wasn't on as to create a better space. The notebook was left near the center of others two desks, the formation was sort of like every 2 desks had something out of the 4. The bottom left and right shared the notebook, the top right and bottom right shared the doll, the top left and bottom left shared the set model, and the two top ones didn't have anything but we left space for them to view the notebook as well. 

We used the classic film major stereotype seen both in movies and real life, they love movies and become very critical of every film they watch as they know more about the working of the films than others do. We also used the stereotype of a college student as her outfits consisted mostly of sweatpants and her life consisted of school and friends. I have to say my group and I worked very well together and we were on the same page about everything when it came to creating our character. We all did our own parts as well without any arguments about who was or wasn't doing something, I took the mood board and creating the slides presentation, Marissa took the soundscape, Christina took the model doll, and Alana took the set model and the notebook creation. We were told by our peers that ours was very well done, which was nice to hear as we had put so much work into it.

To see all the media from this project click here → Mise-en-Scene media

What's so intriguing about Crime?

        Over the years many viewers have found themselves entranced by crime and gangster films. It mixes so many different genres all into one allowing for drama, romance, comedy, and action to meld into one story where viewers never know how to feel about their characters. Crime can either be gangster crime such as the infamous The Godfather or it could be a show of investigation such as the TV show Hannibal or the show Pretty Little Liars. While all of these examples could be put under different genres, they're overall based on crime and investigation.

    The genre has become so infamous for the way it builds suspense within the viewers, wanting viewers to beg for more, just so they can find out inevitably who did it? Director Martin Scorsese is probably the best known for these kinds of films such as The Departed and Goodfellas. These kinds of films have grossed billions of dollars for the film industry as they entrance you.

    These films focus on acts of breaking the law and tend to be psychological thrillers as you never know who's guilty. Most of the time it revolves around the criminals but can also revolve around victims or the actual investigators. The most common plotlines could be murder, theft, or kidnapping investigations as well as betrayal and the lives of criminals. The genre especially explores guilt or pride in crime as well as the dilemma of what is good and what is bad. The movie Ocean's Eight shows the pride criminals can have in their crimes but musicals such as Les Misérables can leave you questioning whether they were bad people or just people in need. 

    Crime films in a broader subject use realistic lighting and muted tones as they want to create neutrality and suspense. On the other hand, films such as gangster films darker lighting to up the suspense even more and create a certain aura around the characters. The sound design consists of echoing and suspenseful sounds and music, building and building on the suspense needed for these films. They're based in urban settings as you wouldn't usually see big crimes done on the Moon, fictional situations aren't exactly used in crime films often but their storylines may be entirely fictional. There's a lot of different perspectives in editing as crime films tend to want to show the suspense of the runner and the chaser.

    Crime films tend to marketed with the slight reveal of a betrayal or plot twist, building suspense for the viewers before they ever go to watch the film. They use voiceovers over scenes of scrambling and action as well as using suspenseful music to entrance viewers by allowing them to think that they may figure out the mystery on their own. 

    An incredible example of this is Zodiac with Jake Gyllenhaal as it follows detectives and journalists as the follow the crimes of the non-fictional serial killer, The Zodiac Killer, it's a widely muted film in terms of colors using a lot of blues to show the depressing tone throughout as Gyllenhaal's character begins to spiral. It's also incredibly realistic as it has the urban setting of San Francisco and uses a real killer as their protagonist. The film focuses on building frustration and tension in the characters as they fail over and over again to find their killer. 

    Another amazing example would be The Silence of the Lambs which similar to Hannibal focuses on the character Hannibal Lecter, while the film is largely known for its' horror aspects, the way it plays with the investigations of Clarice Starling and the help of Lecter makes it fall under the crime genre umbrella. The movie surrounds itself in a complex investigation that builds suspense and makes you think that if Hannibal is helping, is he so awful? The use of dark tones and close-ups build incredible tension between the characters and builds suspense the entire film.

    

Sound projects

     Hey people! In the last 2 weeks we've been working on sound techniques in AICE Media Studies. Through the sound lessons I learned how certain smaller sounds make a huge difference and we learned about the concept of foley sounds (the sounds made by something that isn't the reality of what it is.)

    For our first sound project we were directed to create a video less sound project, we had to convey a full story in 1-2 minutes without any video only using sound. We were directed to use either Microsoft's Clipchamp or Adobe's Premiere Pro, I decided to use Clipchamp (editing software) for my project as it was simplistic and easy to learn with. Me and my partner, Leo, decided to create our story about a student getting to school late and running into (literally) multiple obstacles on the way. We knew our project had to surround itself around running and the sound of footsteps but our teacher advised us that it may get repetitive so we decided we needed to add different sounds to overlay some of the footsteps in order to make it sound better overall. During brainstorming we just wanted to figure out what kind of smaller sounds and the kinds of obstacles we should set out for the subject in order to create a developed storyline. Our outline helped us organize our sounds into different scenes allowing us to identify which sounds would be needed and when we would need them. I feel that we made good choices in how we were going to avoid making repetitive noises and creating a true storyline but I would've wanted to improve how realistic we could've made our foley sounds as I felt they didn't sound entirely real to me.

    To view this specific sound project click here → Sound project #1

    Now for our second sound project we were told to go back to our previous silent One-Word Film projects and add the sounds to the project. I, once again, used Clipchamp as my editing software because it was very easy to understand for the last project. During brainstorming my partner, Alana, and I wanted to make sure we were able to catch all the smaller sounds and still emphasize the very loud fidgeting being done as our initial project was dependent on big actions so we needed big sounds. The outline allowed us to pinpoint the kind of sounds we needed in certain places, especially the amounts of the smaller sounds to know how many rows we would need. I think the project was very well done overall but I would've liked to identify more of the smaller sounds as the project felt empty at times and I didn't know what sounds to put in the background so I used a general AC noise just to fill the emptiness. 

    To view this specific sound project click here → Sound project #2