Research: Mise en Scene (Lighting + Colour) - Ms Begum

Mise en Scene

Lighting and Colour

What is lighting & colour?

- Lighting and Colour can be used to highlight the importance of characters or object within the frame.
- Lighting and Colour is an important convention to thriller because of it helps to convey mood and atmosphere in a scene/film. It can also guide the audience's attention to a particular object, person, emotion or gesture. Lighting can also be used to cast shadows to build tension and suspense.

Angles of lighting

Under lighting: is the light that comes from below the person. This tend to have a distorting effect on the character. In the image, the use of under lighting makes the character appear to look scary as you can see shadows casted on his face and he looks distorted. This will scare the audience.

Top lighting: is the light that comes from above, high lighting the features of a character. Often creates a glamorous look in a character. In the image, the use of top lighting makes the character appear to look mysterious as the we can see that the character is emerging from the shadows. This will make the audience to anticipate bad intentions coming from this character.

Back lighting: the light source is behind the person. If little or no light is used, silhouettes are created. In the image, the use of back lighting makes the characters looks scary and shady as their identity is being hidden and makes them look more powerful as they're those who are standing up and killing the victim.

Type of lighting

Low-key lighting: the lighting is dark with small areas of light, which also creates shadows.

High-key lighting: is the lighting that appears more natural however clearly brighter than natural.

Natural lighting: is when no lighting has been added, it is what you expect to see.

Low-key lighting is conventional to thriller because it helps to creates a dark and dangerous atmosphere where the dark is taking over and the audience can only see a little bit of light. This helps to build up tension, fear and creates suspense and sensational actions in a scene/movie.

Colour in scene

- Colour in scenes have different connotations to them and can give different interpretations of the scene. For example:

Orange: Action-Adventure.













Red: Soft Horror.













Blue: Action Thriller


















Green: Sci-fi Thriller













Dark Blue/Black: Horror














Colours that are conventional to thrillers are red, dark blue and black because it helps to make the scene/film look isolated surrounding by the dark atmosphere creating mysterious and evilness. The colours are also have different connotations from the audience to interpretate each colour to represent different objects or emotions in certain ways.

The combination of low-key lighting and back lighting in the first scene when the female victim is being followed helps to create fear and curiosity towards the audience as they can see the victim is frightened and trying to escape from the antagonist. Also they want to finds out who is the antagonist and for what reason is he following the female. This allows the audience to anticipate something bad would occurs and also helps to creates a suspenseful action in this scene. This makes the audience feel sympathy towards the female and question themselves why has he chosen to follow her and curios about his identity.

Conclusion

All the informations above has helped me to have a deeper understanding of how lighting and colour is being used and have different connotations in thrillers. I'm planning to use under lighting and low-key lighting as they are conventional to thrillers for my AS coursework purposely to help me tp gain as many marks as necessary.