Midsomer Murders Case Study

Camera Shots, Camera Movement, Editing, Sound, Movement, Composition and use of Mise-En-Scene

Midsomer Murders is a British detective drama, targeted at an older demographic, this is evident through the dialogue exchanged by the actors being so prominent and the people shown on camera being typically of an older age demonstrating a clear level of maturity. This is also illustrated due to the show having a grainy feel in terms of its resolution and composition. This drama differs from reality purely for entertainment purposes due to the relationships between the characters being more friendly rather than professional, which is also shown through there being continuous non-diegetic sound helping  to build mystery, positioning the audience to expect something to happen allowing it to follow through to be mainstream. The point of the show is to keep the audience in the shadows of the entire picture and reveal clues throughout to build suspense and unraveling truths slowly through the police detection.

Although the camera work gasps a sense of realism due to multiple camera technology not being evident in this drama, allowing us to undertand the more personal approach to the dilemmas. Shot reverse shot is constantly used to emphasize the friendly relationship between the characters, as the police officers are represented more like friends rather than a professional force, this is also illustrated through the uniform and body language of the main characters have a laid back approach and gossip other than take statements. There are point of view shots although the narrator isn’t truly identified which conforms to the typical behavior of detective dramas. There is also use of slow panning around to show the reactions of all characters to possibly divert some sort of clues from the characters body language which unravels aspects of the crimes. This places all possible suspects in a shot positioning the spectators to judge the situation. With the use of close ups and medium shots the characters emotions are clearly shown through these shots with no dialogue needed.

The mis-en-scene of the detectives costume reflects their working class, but juxtaposes with there profession as they are laid back and friendly towards the anti authority approach to policing. 

Main Task Research & Planning

GENRE

We have chosen:

DRAMA/CRIME

Inspirations:

We thought this movie covered the areas we were intrested in such as crime 

Rolling with the nines

Kidulthood

i

Top Boy

Ill Manors

Sket

Target Audience:

We decided to target teens as our drama clip will be based as a reflection of teenagers in Hackney, with the obvious drama they may experience/ed so we decided to conduct a survey asking what genre people in our college prefered as they fit our target audience:

We drew up some of our ideas on paper to help construct our ideas further...

OUR PLAN -

During our planning process we concluded that our ideas would take too long to fit in our 2min time frame of our opening scene.

So we reconstructed our planning sheets so we had a clear idea of what props we would need and allocate the relevant location for our opening sequence...

We took a big risk and decided to change our genre and initial idea due to it not working out.

We had numerous amount of filming days and there were problems with our actor in relation to costume not being the same so it reflected clear organisation problems.

Here is the planning we done for our second idea as we felt it was well developed and was a better story line:

SHOT LISTS

FLOOR PLANS

CALL SHEETS

STORY BOARDS

SCRIPT

Obsession Script Final2

Christmas Holidays

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

For christmas my sister knows me so well, so she got me the twilight DVD set as its my favourite film, so I thought I could talk about how the representation of vampires being portrayed differently to the typical stereotype.

The typical vampire is dangerous and rather creepy looking, although in Twilight they are represented as the complete opposite. 

There are no similarities here, showing media has re-transformed the stereotype of vampires, portraying them as good people, as the main vampire family in the film do not harm humans, also making them all very attractive; making them people who you generally learn to like.

Also, the genre of the film clearly contrasts with the stereotype of vampires as they are usually involved in films such as horror...

_________________________________________________________________________________

MOVIE TIME AT HOME 

Looking on the media blog through the movies we could watch throughout the christmas holidays I thought I'd choose 'The Shining' as I don't usually watch horror, so I thought I could focus on how horrors are so scary, and how editing projects this. Although I did regret it half way through when I found myself buried beneath my duvet...

TRAILER

We are first introduced to the film as a normal family living a normal life but as the film progresses we see a complete change, I think the camera shots and mis en scene really do enhance the horror in the film as it completely contrasts to the story line we are firstly exposed to, a normal one....

Everything seems to be backwards in this film, which adds to its brilliance, for example this clip shows how backwards things are presented, the women is on a higher level than her husband although she is the vulnerable one in this situation, usually someone who has more control in a situation is positioned on a higher level, also shot reverse shot allows us to position us as the audience in her shoes, allowing us to be involved in the film a little bit more. 

I also noticed the famous shot of the 180 degree rule being completely ignored, although I believed it worked very well, especially in this film as it is full of surprises, the reason for the 180 degree rule is to avoid the audience from getting confused, but the reason for not including this is for the audience to be confused, as the whole story line diverse from a dream and from reality, making the breakage of the rule very effective.