What is mise-en-scene?

1. What is mise-en-scene? • Mise-en-scene is a term used in film to describe everything that you can hear and see on the screen at any time when watching a film. The director’s choices of: • lighting; • scenery and setting; • costumes; • props; • camera shots and camera angles; • body-language of actors; • sound effects; • music, • all help to create a particular atmosphere appropriate for the plot. The director uses mise-en-scene to help enhance the audience’s understanding of a film and his/her decisions about what should and should not be seen on the screen will affect the overall tone of the piece. • Basically, mise-en-scene is the director’s tool to stage events, giving him/her the opportunity to make the ultimate decisions about what the audience sees and hears in the movie. It is the director’s way of adding detail to a film outside of the words an actor delivers in a script and is the equivalent of an author’s use of description in narrative to describe scenes and surroundings in depth. • Watch the clip of ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’. Use the above list to make notes on how the director creates … in the film as described in the novel.