Max's Media Studies Experience: Mise-en-scene Part 2 + Finished Script!

Welcome to part two of the mise-en-scene planning post. Like I said last post, this one will be focusing on the costuming and props. We also finished the script in class today, which will be included in the end. So without further ado, let's get right into it.

Costumes

When it comes to costuming, you really want to think about how a character's costume reflects their personality. This is mainly done through color and the actual clothing items the character wears. For example, a rich businessman would not be wearing skater clothes, he would be wearing professional office shirts and pants with an expensive watch. If he was a villain in the film, then the clothes he would wear would reflect that, so maybe his shirt would be maroon red with black pants. Color in costuming can also be used to show character development. A perfect example of this would be the clothes that Walter White wears in Breaking Bad (2008) over the course of the show as he becomes a professional criminal drug lord.

Here is a color scheme I found that shows what color he wears throughout the first two seasons.

As you can see, he wears darker colors the deeper into the criminal world he goes. Obviously, we can't show subtle character development like this in our two-minute film opening, but I just wanted to talk about that because I thought it was pretty cool and shows how costuming can be used in creative ways.

I talked a little bit about this in my post introducing Alice, but I feel like she should wear greys and darker colors. This would represent her troubled state of mind and life. I also think she shouldn't have too much makeup on and not look like she put too much effort into the outfit, which would also show off her state of mind. I imagine her wearing some sort of grey sweater or dark heavyweight shirt with sweatpants.

For Dr. Schultz, I think her outfit should reflect her professional and apathetic personality. She should wear professional clothing, like a white button-up T-shirt and some sort of professional pants. The colors should be neutral, in order to reflect her corporate personality. I can see her having earrings and her hair being tied back. For T. Jacobs, I think just some sort of professional clothing will do. He works at an office building as an assistant. Color doesn't matter too much since he isn't too important as a character.

Props

Props are items that are within the set design that characters are able to interact with. Since this is a therapy office, we obviously need to include the iconic tissue box on the table. We also want to have a physical timer that will go off when the therapy session ends. Surprisingly, T. Jacobs will have the most props for the opening, with a name tag/badge and some files with paper that he hands to Schultz. Oh yeah, and Schultz will also have a clipboard where she would write notes about our patient Alice. We also are going to need to use one of our phones for the phone call part. We would change one of our contact names to something else to show that it is a "random number." Either we change it to a random number combination or to UNKNOWN CALLER ID. We'll just have to see what looks best during production.

Speaking of the mysterious caller, while brainstorming on who the caller was supposed to be, one of us joked about having a professional actor voice them. We then talked about who we would want to voice them, and Willem Dafoe popped up in the conversation. We then decided to email his publishers for the fun of it on the off chance that he would actually accept something like this.

Here is the email that we sent:

If somehow we got Willem Dafoe on the project, this would definitely go down in AICE Media Studies history as one of the craziest casts for a school project like this one. It would be so cool to have the name "Willem Dafoe" appear in our opening credits and it actually be true. This is just a funny thing that we did in class that I thought I should mention, but if it works that would be so amazing.