Accounting for Mise-en-scene

 

We created this mood-board on padlet to establish which connotations and conventions are behind the mise-en-scene of country and western singers when looking at recreating it.

As a group, we decided that our conventional country and western singer would be a relaxed and laidback person. He would often look out into the distance striking  bold poses. We planned for me to wear flanneled and layered clothing and we wanted a prop so we decided on a stick which replaced the usual straw, to chew on.  We wanted bright lighting because we associated country & western music with being outside.

With our final images, I feel we succeeded in recreating the country and western music genre. The addition of the stick in the mouth gives the images that earthy feel they were needing and my rugged collar positioning is accurate because stereotypically, country & western singers have a certain jagged, hardy look.  Your usual conventions of country signers are urban farm like individuals. I felt like I achieved that look using relaxed and atypical poses, the tilted hat for example.  To make the images look more authentic, I think we could have shot in black and white because I associate old black and white cowboy photos with the genre country and western.

Looking forward,  I am now confident when dealing with mise-en-scene in my image gathering. I feel accounting for mise-en-scene will become useful when making my own magazine because I can stick with a genre extremely closely now knowing some classic conventions, light schemes, costuming and poses of multiple music genres.

In class, after we gathered our photos of a country and western singer we conducted post-it note activity where we had to decode and deconstruct the characters in order to label the connotations given from the outfits worn by the models. This enables us to find out of we communicated the correct conventions as groups. The class noted that my outfit was “chill, rural, earthy and friendly.” As a group we were  satisfied with this class feedback as we wanted to  convey a laidback and down to earth country and western singer.

This activity showed us how audience research can help us decide how to represent a music genre– in our case, country and western. This is because knowing the conventions an audience would expect from a singer in a genre helps the media producers communicate the genre to their greatest ability.