Mise-en-Scene: Costume Research

Costume Research

Our vest top inspired by The Girl in the Photograph

In preparation for filming our film opening, it required a lot of research into what costume would be most effective in achieving a realistic psychological thriller opening. To begin this research, we began by looking at our film inspirations including The Bone Collector and The Lovely Bones, to see what both the protagonist and antagonist wore. From this research we gathered that simplicity was key. 



One of the many costume inspirations came from the protagonist in the film The Girl in The Photograph. As you can see here, she is wearing a plain white vest top with shorts. We drew inspiration from the vest top as this is what we believed to be most effective in creating a realistic portrayal of a young girl in danger, to scare the audience into believing that our storyline could happen to anyone, in particular to target psychological fear into young girls as a part of our target audience. Moreover, the inspiration of having a white vest top denotes a sense of vulnerability of the protagonist as it shows a lot of skin as well as the colour connoting the innocence and purity of the girl that is soon to be corrupted by an antagonist. Moreover, we used the idea of this vest top as by the end of our opening, it would be made clearer to the audience how much the character has been through and 'thrown around' as through costume special effects and makeup it would be easy to make it appear dirty.

As for the trousers we chose our protagonist to wear, we kept it simple by sticking to navy sports jogging bottoms as we found that this is very casual and close to what we believed would be typical of a girl in hiding. Moreover, in the packing scene of our opening we include many items of clothing that the girl throws into her suitcase. Interestingly, each individual clothing item included was as close to that protagonists from other popular horror films such as the Blair With Project and I.T as we wanted the items to be dull and to portray a lack of youthfulness as we wanted our protagonist to be almost drained from life and colour that we felt using inspiration from a range of horror films, would allow us to do.

For example, this pink top worn by one of the teenagers in The Blair Witch Project we took inspiration form and included a very similar top that our protagonist packed in the suitcase.

Additionally, the costume we chose for the antagonist (taxi driver) we decided wasn't going to be entirely visible as we thought this would be the best way to add suspense and curiosity amongst the viewers as to who this man is, as a way of concealing his identity. However the items of clothing we chose to be visible was a grey hat and also to continue the use of dark colours we paired this with all dark clothing that's silhouette can be identified as creepy and as a man of an intimidating build.