I can use mise en scene to communicate meaning. Below is a mood board I created in preparation for a country western themed photo shoot that we made for a tour poster. I did this so that I could grasp an idea of what colours and ideas fitted with my vision so that I could make a better piece of work. It is important to consider fonts, hair and makeup, costumes, body language, facial expression and find inspiration from other shoots or media made in the past because it allows you to develop an idea of what your target audience is interested in and what sells so that you can make the best possible kind of media for the current market. I added a picture of what looks like quite a country landscape. This will help going forward because I now know that research is extremely important when making a piece of media and I now know to do this when creating my music magazine.
We then collected items and accessories to dress our model in that we thought communicated a country and western theme. After dressing our model we asked our peers to analyse our outfits and stick post it notes onto our model with one word that they felt described our models intended aesthetic. We did this so that we could reflect as producers on how we used all the conventions from our chosen genre to encode our models with the appropriate mise en scene and if the audience was able to decode it correctly. In my opinion when creating our country and western star, we did use the correct mise en scene because I feel that it was clear who our model was. For instance, she was wearing a “cowboy” hat (pictured below).This definitely creates a feeling of country because these hats are worn by country and western singers everywhere. In fact when you think of country music that style of hat is something that lots of people immediately think of. Our audience also read our image correctly as well. An example of this would be the post it notes saying “hippy” and “quirky”. We were definitely trying to go for quite a quirky country and western hippy vibe so it was great to see that we were able to communicate that through our costume. It has helped us a lot to get feedback from our peers because we now know going forward to see what their opinions on our costumes are so that we can create the best outfit possible in our future projects.
This is my final chosen photo. I think it definitely relates back to my mood board and the Country and Western genre because my costume is very relaxed and has many generic Country themes. These include the guitar, the Country style hat, the sunglasses and the flowing dress which is similar to the images in my mood board. I think my chosen image works better then the rest of the images we took because I am looking out into the distance as if I am singing a song which really captures the essence of country. The use of mise en scene is really important when taking photos because it allows us to communicate feeling and emotion through things like, costume, hair, makeup and props. If I was taking the same photos in a completely different outfit it would create a whole new meaning which shows just how crucial mise en scene is. This has helped me massively because it will help with with planning for shoots and doing good research for projects. I think that I am much more prepared for photo shoots and how to consider mise en scene when creating my music magazine in the future.
