Mise en Scene - Costume

Clothing or costumes play a big role in the understanding of characters and mood when watching a film. With a good use of costume the audience can interact with what they are watching and allow them selves to create a sense of mood and feeling. It can also, almost foretell a characters attitudes and ways, even there status and role within the film. Colours can also play a big part in this as certain colours mean certain things, for example: Green= Jealousy,

To get a good understanding of costume my group and I have researched many teaser trailers that match our genre (mystery/thriller.) This has helped me a lot in understanding what each character generally or usually wears.

I am going to focus on the characters that play the biggest roles within our teaser trailer. These characters consist of: the child, the villain, the parents and the family liaison officers.

Child.

Most children wear a school uniform. You can also generally tell if they are in junior or senior school, as the uniforms tend to be different.
Those in junior school normally wear something along the lines of: trousers, a polo top and a school jumper or fleece usually black or grey with a coloured jumper/fleece.
Senior school students normally wear a more formal uniform, consisting of trousers, shirt, ties and blazers in colours of black, navy blue or dark grey with a coloured tie.

Being a child is a very fun and innocent time in our lives. Clothing can reflect this in many ways. In countless teaser trailers I have seen children wearing loose fitted clothes commonly in pastel colours. This allows the audience to reflect on the innocence of the children.

We decided to keep with the stereotypical conventions of a young girl, wearing a little dress in pastel colours, tights and ballerina pumps. But, we thought about adding a powerful colour to the child’s costume- Red.

Red is hot. It's a strong color that conjures up a range of seemingly conflicting emotions from passionate love to violence and warfare. This indicates everything about the child that we want it to; the unconditional love of the parents towards the child, the violence and situation that the child is put in and the struggle of the child. Also it’s not only to represent love but danger as well.

We also thought about possibilities of make-up for the child. Young children very rarely, if not at all, wear make-up. But on camera skin tones tend to appear a lot lighter than they are. So adding a tiny amount of red to the cheeks to give the appearance of them being rosy would make the girl look cute and would also this would make her eyes seem large again making her look cute.

Villain.

From our first thoughts and ideas we decided that within our trailer we would keep the villain unseen. We come up with this as we thought it would create more tension for the audience, not knowing whom this horrible person was.
We wanted to keep the kidnapper very mysterious to keep the audience hooked, wanting to know more.

When researching this I found out that the colour black hugely reflected all of the thoughts and feelings that I wanted our audience to feel. Black is associated with power, elegance, formality, death, evil, and mystery. Black is a mysterious color associated with fear and the unknown. It usually has a negative connotation so it was the perfect colours to reflect this character.

In most teaser trailers villains are shown to wear more sophisticated types of clothing. But as our villain was being a kidnapper we thought we would need to tone it down and wear more of a casual approach.
We chose to dress our villain in a black jumper and jeans. We thought that the jeans added a more laid back approach as opposed to formal and the black has negative connotation. Also, in part, our villain is shown in shots outside. So a jacket would be needed. We decided to keep again to a dark jacket.

We are going to add a small amount of make up to the villain to make him look dirty. Maybe some grey colours around his eyes to give the impression of having no sleep and a darker skin tone around the chin area to give the illusion of a rough texture.

Parents.

Within our teaser trailer we want to show our parents as being the loving, affectionate type. Not those that work all day, the ones that are always there. So we did not want them wearing work clothes, as this would give the wrong impression.

Looking at what parents wear on a day to day basis and in teaser trailers that I have researched, I found that the type of parent that we want to mirror usually wear a more casual outfit: jeans, top, jumper. Also we chose to keep these colours quite neutral to not take the light off of the protagonist characters.

On the mother we would like natural make-up.

Family Liaison Officers.

A Police Family Liaison Officer (FLO) is a role of an officer either of uniformed or plain-clothed Criminal Investigation Department (CID) role.

We chose this type of officer rather than a general police officer, as they are most likely to deal with the incidents that we are showing within our teaser trailer.
They are very formal so need to be shown wearing a type of suit. But to show who they are and what they do a badge is necessary.

On the officer we would like natural make-up but a bit more than the mother.

News reporter

As seen on various news programs, news reporters tend to wear very formal clothing, consisting of: shirt, black trousers and a cardigan or some sort of jacket.
We have chose to keep with these typical conventions as they are seen everyday on the television and changing this would be un-professional.