The Moving Man

This week we've began to create a formalist film called The Moving Man, which was influenced by The cabinet of Dr Caligari. We'd been looking at formalism and realism and had to create a formalist film to show our understanding of the genre. To make it easier we allocated everyone parts e.g. mise en scene, camerawork, editing, sound and lighting. I took mise en scene along with Amber and Olivia. At first we wanted to use a mannequin to represent the man but were not able to find one. Our next idea was slightly easier; we decided to use a man in a mask. This gave our film an abstract and unreal element. Also the mask we choose was of a creepy looking old man who had facial features similar to the faces of those in The cabinet of Dr Caligari. As homework we had to bring in any props for the film, i brought in the mask and some large monster feet. I also brought in a selection of ties because another of our ideas was to have the man wearing one of the ties and everytime he moved it would move to a different position. However once he (or i should say she) was in costume it became a sort of inconvinent extra which would provoke all sorts of filming problems.

The film was created by turning a normal acivity of walking a dog into an abstract form. We did this by using different objects to represent the dog. First we used a Knight (chess peice) which looks quite similar to a dog and then moved onto using more abstract forms e.g. a flipper and a doll. In the rough cut we used darkness to cover up the man moving. I think the doll worked really well because we used the lighting to make it scare the audience. At this point the lights went off and when they came back on it was a close up of the creepy mask stroking the doll.

For my film my main work on the mise en scene will not be on the clothing and props but the landscapes and positioning of things unlike our film. However I can use this as a practice run for my film, which will help me be mire organized next time.