Without the thought process, it is just “photographs of people talking”.1
Introduction
Before a performance, live or recorded, many things have to be taken into account. Location, setting, props, and costumes are vital in most cases, as well as where the camera will be and plans for zooming and angling and such. Questions need to be answered and scenes need to be planned! Will the camera stay still or be moved from place to place? Are there things in the scene that will need to be moved or changed? How much space is needed for movement of the camera and the people involved-actors, reporters, speakers? There are a great number of questions involved and that is why planning is essential.
Mise en scene (pronounced meez on sen) translates from a French theatrical term that means “placing on stage”. Anyone who creates, whether it be through writing, painting, sculpting, theater, or film, knows how important “setting the stage” is. Mise en scene covers the basics of who, what, when, and where while the storyline fills in the blanks and also covers the why and how. Whereas in theatrical performances a stage designer works in a 3-dimensional space, in a film it gets “more complicated, a blend of the visual conventions of the live theater with those of painting.”2 The filmmaker must think about and deal with the “fluid choreographing of visual elements that are constantly in flux.”3
The frame is the visual box of what is seen and the director must consider not only what is physically set in the frame but also distance, angle, and focus. Changing camera angles and changing focus, panning in and out or even using special effects are things that make film significantly different than its counterpart, theater. Once the stage is set with background, foreground, props, lighting, costumes, and actors, (the visual elements that make up the who, what, when, where part) framing comes into play to build a relationship between the viewer and who or what is in the scene before filming or photography can begin. Mise en scene is largely about the thought process in film making of what will be in each individual frame, each scene, and each sequence. Then, after the filming is done comes splicing, editing, and cutting film to create a final, completed, piece.
Alain Bergala wrote, in The Cinema Hypothesis, that it is essential to provide students with “an alternative to purely consumerist cinema” and that having select films available for students can shed light on teaching “based on setting up connections between films, sequences, shots, and images drawn from other art forms”.4 In this unit I will present full movies, scenes from movies, clips, and stills, as well as non-film photographs and paintings to help students understand and practice “mise en scene” framing. The realistic narrative is the focus of the films used in this unit, but other genres do follow the same basic guidelines. This unit is meant for my high school Art and Filmography class but could easily be used to teach film, photography, or 2-dimensional art; it could also be used in other classroom settings, in particular in Drama and English.
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