Multimedia Mise-En-Scene Project
Welcome back friends! Recently I completed group project to explore elements of mise-en-scene. We randomly selected a character description and had to develop an interactive and immersive presentation of this character through physical representations, settings, and audio.
My group and I aimed to make our class feel like they knew our character by making them imagine her life as they if they are a part of it. We wanted to use a unique and interactive method to make this happen.
Who Was Our Character?
Here was the character we picked: "A movie lover who enjoys social get togethers with friends. They write a movie blog on which they post critiques of popular movies."
From this, we created Cameron Lee. She is 21 year-old college student at the University of Southern California majoring in screenwriting. She lives in an apartment and works part-time at Starbucks. As a movie-lover, she spends much of her leisure watching and critiquing films. She enjoys posting her movie reviews on her blog and is even part of her university's movie club. If she isn't watching movies, she is hanging with friends because she loves spontaneous hangouts and sharing movie reviews on Letterboxd, a movie review platform, between her friends.
How Did We Illustrate Our Character?
We created a mood board to develop and idea of what our character is like and what bring the thoughts we have of her onto paper. Through this mood board, we attempted to create a laidback vibe, similar to the one Cameron would give off.
You can learn so much about someone through how their home looks! So we built a 3D model of Cameron's apartment so people can pick up on her coziness and free-spirit.
In order for our classmates to imagine what she looks like, we built a paper doll of Cameron in hopes of getting our peers to really know her. This way they can put a face to the personality.
The diary entry added a deeper glimpse into Cameron's life as it is another personal accessory that shows who a character is. '
For the interactive and really immersive part of the presentation, we built a tactile board for our peers to touch while listening to everyday sounds in Cameron's life. It was also paired with a soundscape and videos of her everyday life. During the soundscape, an instruction will show on the screen to touch a specific object on the tactile board. This way, our peers hear the sound and what it feels like at the same time. This mimiced living in Cameron's body. You can find this soundscape & video element in the presentation linked later in this post.
Presentation
We organized all of our elements into a slides presentation so our class can slowly and thoughtfully get to know Cameron by interacting with the elements of the presentation in an order we felt would best allow our peers to get to know her.
For us, this starts with a with a description of who Cameron is so our peers have a clear background on what inspired our project and choices. We followed with an analysis of her personality to dive deeper into elements only Cameron's friends and family would get to know. We chose to follow with the mood board next as it is a visual representation that reinforces information from the previous slides, such as who Cameron is and what kind of personality she has. Then we made it more complex by adding the soundscape & video element paired with the tactile board. At the end of the presentation, we gave time for our peers to play one of Cameron's favorite songs while exploring her apartment so they can imagine Cameron is in the room with them.
Our character station had 4 computers to display the slides presentation to 4 people at a time and all of the physical and tactile representations were placed at the center of the table.
Analysis
Our selection of what Cameron is surrounded by is focused on movie and blog-specific objects. This includes popcorn, paper, and pens. We used soft, warm colors to reflect her laidback and free spirit. We stereotyped Cameron as what a movie lover looks like to us. That would be a move fanatic that is always watching films and knows all about the film industry. Like all stereotypes, we exaggerated what a movie lover really is. Of course, real life movie afficiandos do not watch films and hang out with friends as their only hobbies. Cameron's life was studied at a micro level. We did this by presenting visual elements of her life, through the model of her apartment living room, her diary, and videos of her watching a movie with friends and attending a college lecture. Audio elements include the soundscape that was paired with the tactile board. By analyzing Cameron at a micro level, our peers were able to get to know her very intimately.
Reflection
My group and I could have managed our time better. However, working them was very fun! We were easily able to build off of each other's ideas to create our character and come up with unique and creative ways to immerse our peers into her life. Because we were all interested in contributing into this project, we reached all of the goals we built in the first place. After visiting the other character stations, I feel we could have improved by incorporating games into our station to engage our audience better.
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