Friday 3 March 2017

Question One: In what way does your media product use, develop or challenge forms or conventions of real media products?

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms or conventions of real media products?

The term 'mise- en-scene' comes from the French theatrical expression 'put into scene', it encompasses location, costume, make-up actors and actresses. It is the elements that are deliberately chosen to put into the scene that can often define the genre of film.

Locations

Our mise-en-scene is significant because we have challenged some aspects of film noir conventions and some we have conformed to, for example, our locations have been inspired by the typical Film Noir locations, here are some example of classic locations used in Film Noir compared to our location which was a dark alley way, this was an incredibly common location.
The dark alley way is a classic location for a film noir film, the dark shadows and industrial brick all conform to film noir's conventions. 

Another example of our media film conforming to the film noir conventions is our location for our final ad climatic scene, this is where our actor Laurie had been tied up to a chair in a desolate, run down and dark garage. This location conforms to film noir conventions as we were able to use lighting to create dark shadows, this is a key convention of film noir. The dark shadows hint to something sinister and create a tense atmosphere for the audience. The significance of the dark and desolate is how the room is representing the feelings of the American society through dark shadows and emptiness, this portrayed the feelings of sadness and emptiness that American society was feeling in post-war 1940's, this is what Film Noir was meant for.

An intertextual reference we have made through our garage scene is the 1992 'Reservoir Dog's', this film is about a kidnapped policemen, through looking at the scene where he has been kidnapped we took inspiration from this. 

Through mise-en-scene of locations, we have developed the conventions of film noir, we have done this by existing media we have taken on board the locations as such and applied them to our film.

Costume

Although our film has elements inspired by 1940's film noir, the costume took a modern approach. Instead of pinstripe suits and bowler hats, we opted for dark, modern clothing. We wanted our character to look strange, dark clothing is suggestive of a tragic past and gloomy character. Laurie;s hair also makes him stand out incredibly well, he was a red Mohican with red tips. This not only conveys him as a little odd but also someone who is dangerous through the colour symbolism of his hair. Red symbolised anger, danger but also love. 

Catlin, our own female actor in the film, had a costume inspired by Sin City. We wanted to take a modern femme fatal look, same as Laurie we used colour symbolism in her costume. Sin City used the colour red for symbolism too, in our thriller the use of red exagreates the femme fatale by coveying a portrayl of sex and violence.

Our antagonist wears a dark costume to convey violence and a dark character, he hides in the shadows so his costume isn't visable. The dark colours forshadow bad things to later come, through lighting you are unable to see his face, this makes the antagonist seem villianous and wicked.

Lighting

In our film we conformed to typical lighting of film noir, the most common of film noir lighting is low key. This creates a chiaroscuro style for the scene, this style emphasises the depth of shadows and the harshness of the lighting. Here is an example of how we used low key lighting in our film, the shadows emphasise the darkness of our film in terms of what has happened to him. 
The low key lighting coneys a sense of sadness, through shadows its creates a tense atmosphere.