Mise-en-Scene: Setting, Props and Lighting (2)

Mise-en-Scene

The Taxi and Alleyway

The second location we chose to film in was a taxi, this was compulsory for us as a group as we had chosen for our film to be based around the antagonist being a taxi driver. This was convenient for us as a group as two out of the four of us have fathers that own a cab and are taxi drivers. We used this to our advantage as we had to option to chose who would drive us around for the footage on what days and if one of the parents was at work when we wanted to film we would therefore have the option to film with the other parent. Moreover, in terms of where we drove we kept it local, on the road of one of our houses as we felt this was more convenient and when doing some test shots before filming we found that the street lamps and the wide road made the area appear eerie and isolated due to the lack of cars and pedestrians.

As for the alleyway, we chose this location again as it was nearby and only required a short walk to get to, making it convenient for all of us and also because it was narrow making it appear confined and neglected. We believed that this would be a good location therefore as it appears to be a typical place that a murderer would leave a body in a rush in the dark of night and we thought that the scene would appear well framed due to the lamp in the background and the long length of the alley. As we all live nearby to that alley, we were all aware of how scary it is to walk down during the night therefore we had hoped this fear would be installed onto the audience when they watch it.

Trophy killer collection item

As for props, for the alleyway scene we only needed a hair extension and a pair of scissors. We chose the hair extension so that is adds to the trophy killer aspect of the film and so her real hair isn't cut and the scissors as they connote danger and foreshadow future unpleasant events that are to come in the film.
However for the cab scene, this required us to make a trophy killers item that would then hang from the wing mirror of the taxi. Therefore we chose to add the most random objects we could find lying around the house as well as buying objects such as a doll and taking off the head, shoe laces, sewing kits and many more abstract items to denote that the girl is in danger from a man who may be mentally disturbed. In the cab scene also, we added some religious symbolism in regards to the items we chose for example the rosary beads that hung from the dashboard and a fake lit candle. We chose this as religious symbolism is a stereotypical convention in psychological horror therefore wanted to incorporate it into our film.

As for lighting in the cab scenes, we used the interior yellow cab lights to create a sickly appearance onto the protagonist as well as holding a torch light from a low angle frontal lighting perspective in order to create shadows on both the protagonist's and antagonist's face. This would therefore give a more eerie appearance for the build up before the murder. Moreover, in the cab, we had one of us stand outside of the cab running up and down with a few torch lights to create the illusion of cars going past at the times when the cab was stationary.

As for the lighting in the alleyway, we used the street lamp that was already there and lit that acted as a high angle shadow, concealing the identity of the antagonist as well as multi torches shone form a face on high angle view of the protagonist laying on the ground so that the audience could identify her neck bruising to know that she has been killed. We decided to use torches as it was cost-effective as all of our phones had one as well as us all owning physical torches.