Laura Talks About Mise En Scene

Below are some furhter notes on the other Media Concepts in terms of our short film... We switch the representations of Amy  and Sam around in the film. Originally Sam
is portrayed negatively, as a stereotypical ‘lad’. We see this through the
dialogue he uses with his friends, such as “bird” and “go out on the pull”,
stereotypical teen slang and through his costume (which is explained in the vlog above). This means we sympathise with
Amy, as she is being ignored and called “clingy”, yet, by the end the audience
sympathise with Sam. This heightens the audience’s sympathy as they feel bad
for judging him initially. 

Audience

We need to make sure the audience is active, and we need to try to control how
they are feeling throughout the film. For example in terms of the way they
perceive the characters and their emotions. We looked at a short film called
‘Alone’ in our research. This was based on domestic violence, but in terms of a
wife being domestically abused by her husband, and we as an audience are
experiencing it from the child’s perspective. This meant that the audience
already has an emotional attachment as a child is innocent and naïve, therefore
meaning they are much more likely to sympathise with them. In our film we are
representing teenagers, who stereotypically do not have a good reputation among
society, therefore we are going to have to work harder to try to get audience
sympathy for our character Sam, as the audience for our film is quite broad,
though primarily it is for teenagers.



Genre

Our film conforms to the genre of social realism. (hyperlinked is a really good website, explaining what this genre is, and what the features of it are). We wanted to portray the
serious issue of domestic abuse as this is something that is rarely spoken of
in society, yet when doing our interview with Kate Rogers, a local nurse, we
found that she gets many cases of social violence. Yet, often these are only
suspected cases as it is often something that victims are too frightened to
speak about. So through our film we wanted to raise awareness, especially with
the different take where it is the man who is the victim. We have used the
location of the hospital as it portrays the most serious outcome of domestic
violence. The genre influences our social group that we are representing as it
is made clear that teenagers have more people to hide the abuse from. His
mother is referenced in the film and we see Sam talking to his college friends.
When he walks away from them at college they say, “that was a bit weird”, as
domestic abuse is not something that they have to encounter and so they cannot
recognise the traits of a victim.



Narrative

Our film does not conform to any narrative theories, and it follows a non-
linear structure. We used flashbacks in order to portray the gradual
deterioration of Sam and Amy’s relationship, yet, the audience do not work out
it is domestic abuse until the final flashback; Amy only hints at domestic
violence in the second and third flashbacks when she hits him with a pillow and
pushes him onto the sofa.