Mise en scene of The Missing Suspect thriller

Taking mise en scene into consideration of our thriller production, we needed to purchase particular props. Firstly we thought about the costume which the killer should wear. We wanted to the killer to wear simple but memorable clothes; therefore we chose to make him wear a boiler suit. The dark blue of the suit adds to the effect of a thriller as the gloomy colouring creates a mysterious and sinister atmosphere.

To fit the character of cold hearted murderer, the idea of him wearing gloves supports his methodical charcteristics. This connotes his phycotic behaviour as the gloves show precision and caution which creates suspense for the audience as their imagination wonders in thinking of how carries out his crimes.

Also, to show the dark theme, we needed a bag of some kind that the killer would be seen dragging a body in. Therefore, as a sleeping bag is associated comfort and camping, usually an adventurous and memorable experience, it shows the heartlessness of this killer how he as disregarded any emotion that may be related to this familiarity.

The unknown suspect is also seen contacting the 'Boss' on a mobile phone which we included to relate to the audience as this prop in very common in todays society. This makes the sequence more realistic and also, it wasn't hard to purchase.

As we wanted to show the disturbing psychological behaviour of the killer, we decided that an interesting way to do this was for the audience to see him place an arrangement of flowers on the body of the victim. At first we thought a red rose would be effective as the vibrant colour red is easily associated with blood. However, as a red rose also symbolises passion as well as anger, it conflicted with our representation of the killer as we thought that the audience may perceive him to have emotions. To avoid this perception, we changed the idea of a rose to an arrangement of lilies which are commonly seen at funerals representing innocence, purity, and resurrection. They're often associated with the Virgin Mary and resurrection when placed on woman’s grave. When I researched the symbolic meaning of lilies at funerals, I found they also symbolise the restored innocence of a soul at death. This connotes the vindictive characteristics of the antagonist.

As the narrative outline of our thriller includes criminal suspects, we gathered two images of convicted felons from the internet printing them out to look like identity photographs. This involes two images with question marks representing the unidentified suspects. As we were unable to film inside of a real police station, these props make the situation of an investigation more convincing. Along with collecting images of suspects, we needing images of female victims including a photgraph of me (Rachel Brooke) as missing victim number three. Like the potential suspects, below the images are pieces of relevent information that the audience need to know. Also is an image of another criminal found on the internet, however this image takes on the role of missing informant, Bob Jones to fit the opening script.




(Alex Christian)