Devil in the detail

Mise en Scene in your Thriller sequence is extremely important. If your character(s), set, locations, lighting and props do not look 100% believable then the audience will not take the story seriously and will not be gripped.


You must aim to create a painstaking, stunningly accurate recreation of your fictional world – this quality (of appearing to be real) is called verisimilitude and is a key component of enabling an audience to ‘suspend disbelief’. This means they can forget that they are sitting in the middle of a hall full of strangers watching some light flicker on a screen and instead be engrossed in the fictional world that you have created. 


If they are not convinced by the reality of your film then the audience will not have any emotional connection to your characters and will not care whether they are in great danger, have only a second to save mankind or [insert any other suspenseful scenario]. Instead they will be constantly aware that the characters, events and world are not genuine and will not give a monkey's who gets shot, savaged or squashed.


You are making the first two minutes of a feature film, not the first two minutes of a ‘student’ film. Make it look convincing through careful research and sourcing of all mise en scene components.

Costumes, Lighting, Actors, Make up, Props, Sets and/or Locations are all separate categories that need major consideration and a minimum of 2 blogs each – one about researching and another about sourcing the materials. 


One little mistake on any of these details will blow any semblance of reality, the audience will lose belief and your thriller will be toast. For example: freaky tattooed psychopath  defacing photos of former girlfriends in homage to the title sequence from Se7en. Beautifully shot and edited, unnerving original soundtrack, scary as hell, what a nutter. 


Except he is scribbling out the faces of the girls with a berol felt tip pen. Budget.

"Ice creams, ice creams!"

The Hollywood classical narrative structure relies on continuity editing to create a seamless and believable world within a film. It tells the audience where things are (spatial relations) and how shots relate to each other time-wise (temporal relations). For example, generally when we see a hard cut between shots we understand that the action happens back to back, but if we see a slow 'dip to black' that tells us that some time has passed (traditionally symbolising a night has gone by I guess, hence the black?).
 
This week we shot and edited the preliminary filming exercise, which incorporated the godfather of all continuity edits – shot/reverse shot. The basic idea is to shoot one character left of frame, looking right and another right of frame, looking left. Then, when these are edited together the audience assumes that the characters are facing each other (in the same location) and therefore having a conversation.

This may sound pretty obvious, but imagine how different the film would look if one of the shots were flopped, like the second shot below (reversed around a vertical axis, so that it looks like a mirror image). 

If these shots were cut together now, the characters would look like they were in unrelated locations, talking to themselves or to other, unseen characters. By the way, these stills are taken from Carol Reed's masterpiece The Third Man (1949), one of the greatest mystery thrillers ever made.

Here's the short sequence I grabbed the stills from [If you want to take a screen grab from a youtube video or webpage, hit command-shift-4 if you're on a mac, or the button that says "print screen" if you're using a pc]. Notice how the juxtaposition of these two shots, and a long shot of a woman, looking down from a window, map out the location perfectly. You never see any of the characters together in any of these shots, but still have a complete understanding of where each character is in relation to the others. There is a beautiful edit, when the lady turns on a light and it slants down to illuminate Harry's face. Harry gives a little glance up, (which helps to make sure the audience is aware of their relative positions) and then looks back, to where his old friend Holly is, standing across the road, staring back at a man he believed was dead.

As for the close up shot of Harry when the light is switched off, well what can I say, it is breathtaking. By creating this change in diegetic lighting, the director not only makes the mysterious Harry vanish into the night, but he also makes the world of the film very concrete and believable, due to the realistic, physical property of the lighting effect.


The Third Man is one of my favourite films of all time and it also features the greatest soundtrack ever written (composed and performed by Anton Karas), though it was only rated 26th by a panel of so-called experts in The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/mar/18/features.musicmonthly14


Once heard never forgotten. Even if you do manage to forget, you'll get a reminder, next time a Mr Whippy van heads in your direction...

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