Mise-en-Scene 📹

Hey Blog!

The Mise-en-scene project has been, by far, the most interesting project I've ever worked on. After being given a character description, my team and I had to create a full representation of this character in a multimedia presentation that encompassed the many sides and aspects that made up this character. Our presentation had to include a description of the character (literal or visual), a mood board, a setting that best characterizes them, and audio and tactile elements for added depth and variety.

Alice Rose, or AR, as she prefers to be called, is a tech-savvy middle schooler who loves computers, tinkering with gadgets, and hanging out with her friends and the character we'd been assigned to create. She loves videogames, the color indigo, and coding and robotics.

My team and I, after much brainstorming, thought the best way to represent her character was to use her own abilities in our favour. Using Scratch, a simple coding website by MIT, we created an interactive room where many items could be clicked in order to learn more about AR through the things she keeps in her bedroom. I designed the room using Canva and, in it, we included a large computer where she spends her afternoons, a robot, and a box of tools with which she creates gadgets, as well as posters of her hobbies and photos of her friends. With the coding, it was possible to click on all these items and learn of their importance in AR's life. 

Click here to visit the interactive room. 

Aside from this coded setting, we created a playlist that covered some of her tastes including original soundtracks and a genre called shoegaze, featuring her favourite artists from each and we brought in a small robot, used for robotics, to represent one that she was building.

We used a couple of stereotypes when creating AR since we made her a very "boyish" girl after reading that she was tech-savvy. This is a stereotype because it is what is largely seen en masse about girls that are techy; they're not generally "girly."  We followed the basis of the character's traits as they were given to us and we used selection to make sure that these were specifically demonstrated by only showing those traits, i.e. the computers to show the techy side of her.

I think that my group did a great job in creating all the elements required because we gave her a solid personality that describes all sides of her required and we included all of these in a single space that represented her. Every team member contributed to a different aspect of the project, with someone making the playlist, someone the mood board, someone the coding and I the bedroom setting. Through all this process we talked with one another and discussed what best portrayed her character through the choices we made in each of our tasks. The outcome of this project as a logical and coherent project that I think the whole team is quite proud of. Despite this project's difficulties, we worked hard to present a good representation of our dear character.