the video lecture this week has three main goals one to introduce to you the term misonsen and describe what it means to give you some background on all of the different production departments that it encompasses and what their jobs are and give you examples of each of the elements of production encompassed by or referred to by misonsen all right so the first thing to understand about misonsen is it is a french term that actually is from theater and so originally it means to set or arrange or place all of the elements of a theatrical production but it ends up being used by a bunch of french film critics to describe something similar in cinema but unique to the process of film making so mison sen has come to mean a great many things one film theorist by the name of adrian martin has described it as a term that means everything and nothing very specific so the thing i want you to understand off the bat is that our version of misonsen that we're using in this class is not the end-all-be-all definition and so there are some film scholars that use the term to encompass this indescribable expression of an artistic vision through the aesthetics and visual totality of film some relate that to the auteur or to the like singular vision of a director some film critics like vf perkins lump in editing and cinematography into misonsen others exclude that and instead consider mison sin to be everything in front of the camera and that's much closer to the definition we're gonna use in this class which comes from david bordwell and kristen thompson specifically out of this textbook called film art and so what they're referring to and what we will be referring to when we discuss misonsen are all of the production elements that go into creating everything that gets filmed by the camera this includes set design costuming hair makeup lighting the performance of the actors the choreography and blocking and staging of the actors all of these elements and so we're gonna break those down individually and discuss what production departments are associated with them as we go forward to begin i want to look at costuming hair and makeup as separate departments of a production first up i want to highlight the job of the costume designer or the costuming department and so the head of this department is the head costume designer they coordinate and manage sometimes a whole army of other people all related to the creation of management of acquisition of the costumes that everybody in front of the camera wears and that's the name actors all the way down to the background actors or extras in the scene and so what a costume designer does is first they will start with sketching out what the look of a costume will be just like a fashion designer and then the job of realizing those sketches is handed off to their whole costume department people who have to go out and find the right materials to then build the costumes from and so the costuming department handles the entire creation of and wardrobing of all of the actors to give you a sense of some famous costume designers there's edith head who is up on the top image and may look a little familiar to you if you've seen the incredibles because edna mode is based off of edith head she designed the costumes for many of alfred hitchcock's most famous films below her is colleen atwood not only is the job of a costume designer to lay out what these costumes are going to look like but also to create multiple copies of them any superhero movie that you've ever seen there is probably 5 to 20 different versions of everybody's costume and so this is part of the purview of the job is to figure out what materials show up best on camera respond best to production lights are breathable and movable for actors to be in all day all of that falls under the job description of members of the costuming department and specifically the head costume designer next we move to the makeup and hair departments and i want to emphasize that there's a pretty wide spectrum of what the artists in these departments are going to be doing when most people think about makeup and hair they think about makeup and hair effects something elaborate like this from pan's labyrinth where an actor is being put under layers and layers of latex and prosthetics that is part of what these departments can do oftentimes that overlaps with special effects or makeup effects departments however the majority of your film productions are going to have makeup and hair people applying general makeup elements to performers styling hair and things like that in a film you're going to be wearing some kind of powder on your face because when you're under production lights they are hot and you will sweat and if you sweat your face is going to glisten on camera and that is not what filmmakers want hair departments by the way will be styling an actor's natural hair but will often also be applying wigs say you're spending a week shooting a dialogue scene in a cafe a hair department may style every actor's hair each day and get it pretty similar from one day to the next but often times they will simply apply a wig to an actor so that it is without a doubt the same across a whole week now all of these elements hair makeup costuming they can contribute to the narrative in something like beyond the lights the main character you have a lot about her conflict conveyed through her costuming makeup and hair that doesn't have to explicitly be stated through exposition and so she is a character who's this major pop star but we get the idea through her costuming that her image has been manipulated and controlled by her mother and by the mostly male music industry and so when we first kind of meet her as a pop star she's wearing these skimpy outfits she's wearing wigs that cover up her natural hair however as the film goes on and she manages to escape that stardom and engage in a private romance we see her strip away all of those elements she goes back to her natural hair her makeup becomes much more minimal she's wearing more relaxing clothing and we start to see the real noni as she is able to get back in touch with herself the next two departments that we're going to talk about will be lumped under the heading of production design and so first up we have props overseen by a prop master just like the costuming department there are a number of props assistants that will be managed by the props master and what they're handling are all of the props that are not worn by actors because anything worn by them would be handled by a costume department part of a props department's job may be to find the pieces and assemble whole cloth something like a lightsaber in star wars or a magic wand in harry potter but also a props department might have a number of members that go out and acquire props there are warehouses that keep all sorts of weird knickknacks and objects that might be rented by a film productions and once again a prop tells you a lot about the background of a character about the setting of a movie and so in something like a western the outlaw is defined by their weapon in something like the quick and the dead leonardo dicaprio's character he's this brash cocky young gunfighter and so of course his gun is polished and it's ornate and it's got all this little detail on it and so these are all things that might be handled by the members of a props department next up for production design we have the idea of set design and the responsibility of this department can be divided easily into two different categories there are sets that have to be built or constructed and then there is the job of going out and finding pre-existing locations to go and film in in terms of sets being built hollywood has been doing this since the very beginning of filmmaking and the reason that you have to construct sets it allows you complete control over what you're filming in the very bottom image from the force awakens that looks like it's out in a forest and certainly jj abrams could have found a forest somewhere waited for it to snow and filmed out there but that would have taken so much more time even more money than that already astronomical budget had and so instead they build a forest what this allows them to do is to control the lighting so that it is consistently at night you don't have to wait for the actual sun to go down you're in charge of the weather and so you have snow machines fire out fake snow so that you don't have to wait for actual snow to happen it's not freezing cold so your actors die of hypothermia this is all part of what the set department would be doing now what you also might find in this department are location scouts and location managers what a location scout does is they literally travel all around the country different cities states whatever and they try to find a location that will match what is in the script and so in something like the grand budapest hotel the actual hotel is an old shopping mall that has been refurbished by the production to make it look like a fancy hotel and then you might have somebody who is a location manager they're making sure that they have clearance in order to shoot in that location that it's not getting damaged or if it does get damaged they're in charge of having to fix it before turning it back over to the original owners all of those different jobs now we move into the aspect of misonsen that would encompass performance so what i want to lay out up front is that i think our common conception is that an actor just gets in front of the camera and they play a character bing bang boom but there are so many jobs that end up constructing the performance we eventually see on screen so when an actor gets a part they may do a ton of research into the background of a character that they're playing but also once an actor gets onto set they may work with a whole team of people to help form that performance every actor goes out in front of the camera and they make choices you make the choice to deliver a line in a yell to turn a certain way when you deliver a line to take off your glasses to put them on these are all choices that actors make but of course those choices are also mediated by the influence of a director and so the director may come over and go listen i like what you're doing when you place your hand on this other actor's shoulder but when you do it i don't want you to look in their eyes i want you to look away from them and they negotiate that as partners in creating the total performance however there are also whole teams of people who end up honing the physical aspects of a performance and i won't get into this much here because we're gonna delve into it later and then of course once a film has finished shooting the editor's decision determines what that performance ends up looking like before an actor even steps foot on set however there's a whole department of people that determine which actors are going to step foot on set and so this is the casting department headed up by a casting director and their job is broken down into one of two responsibilities either they're holding auditions for a part where they bring in a whole slew of actors to read lines from the script to perform in front of camera to potentially act off of other actors who've already been hired and then eventually to select from those audition tapes which actor gets the part but casting directors may also simply communicate with an actor's agent or manager to send them the script and ask them if they want to take on the part if an actor's big enough they often don't have to come in and audition anymore but something that they're gauging across any of those jobs is whether or not a performance matches the tone of the film or the personality of a character and so somebody like nicholas cage he has a very distinct range of performance styles and that works for some films and it doesn't for others so in something like david lynch's wild at heart cage's surreal bombastic performance fits into that nightmarish dreamlike movie but in a film like the remake of the wicker man cage's performance comes off as over the top and exaggerated and goofy and becomes fodder for memes for years and years after gauging whether an actor is right for a part and right for the overall tone of a movie is something that the casting director will consider all performances also need to be blocked or staged and this is another piece of terminology that originally comes from theater but what it means is that the decisions on where an actor is going to move where they're going to stand where they're going to sit but also how the camera is going to follow them all of those decisions need to be made beforehand and mapped out and so if you're on a film shoot you'll often see little x's made with tape a production assistant or camera assistant may have laid those down and those are marks of course for actors to hit this ends up being a coordinated process between the actor the director and the camera operators anytime you've heard back to one this is what that's referring to just like in a dance there are steps and so an actor may come into a room and that's position one and the camera is also located at position one but then they might walk around another actor and sit down at a desk at position two and the camera person has to know where to move to get to its second position as well the process whereby this is all laid out is called blocking or staging choreography is where blocking gets complicated and so there are departments like the stunt department who handles scenes or sequences like fight scenes or big dance numbers where the blocking has to be much more complicated than simply walking through an environment what a fight choreographer might do or a dance choreographer might do is work for weeks or months before that scene is going to be shot they might work with an actor to potentially train them in whatever the skill is they need to display whether that is a form of martial arts whether that is a style of dance but also to train them specifically in the movements and steps of that particular scene that they're going to be shooting all of that needs to be learned and carefully choreographed so that nobody injures themselves but also so that every little moment shows up on camera the way it's intended to so that we register it when somebody gets hit with a gun or gets thrown through a table or something like that and so advanced forms of blocking are considered choreography the final element of mise-en-scene that we're going to talk about today is lighting and the first thing to know is that all aspects of lighting are overseen by the director of photography and the director of photography is the person who is in charge of the entire camera department now below them are camera operators there are camera assistants there are focus pullers people whose sole job it is to change focus the director of photography also oversees grips and gaffers and those are the crew members who help set up and arrange all of the lighting gaffers are specifically dedicated to deal with lighting grips are people who essentially lug the equipment off the trucks and help set it up the production lights that a director photography and their crew work with are not like normal lights the bulbs put out so many more kilowatts of light than a normal bulb would because for the longest time cameras needed an excessive amount of light in order to emulsify the film stock nowadays digital cameras are able to work with natural light and lower light scenarios a lot more easily but that does not remove the fact that most productions still use these high intensity production lights the foundation of lighting is the idea of three-point lighting and what this entails is a key light is what is putting out the most light the harshest brightest light and so it is meant to give the most illumination that is why it is the key light it's the most important one that however is balanced out by fill light and so if you put a harsh light on one side of something the other side is going to fall into shadow and so the fill light is meant to offset that and so that shadow then gets lightly filled in by this white diffusion over this light and so it is spreading out that light and sending it out in a not a harsh streak like a key light would and so it's going to fill in this side of the actor's face and body and then the third point is the backlight and so this is light that will be hitting the usually the back of their head so that it separates them from the background and so these three lights all work together to fully light whatever the subject of that shot is now there are ways to refer to lighting in terms of distinct styles and so one way to refer to this is high key lighting and for decades and decades this is how hollywood shot nearly all of its films and what it meant is let's illuminate every aspect of a scene and so you'll see in this shot from how to marry a millionaire that the actors are all brightly lit but so is the background there's a little bit of darkness but you can see everything pretty clearly same thing with girls trip everybody's pretty well illuminated the room's illuminated and so high key lighting is about brightness and evenness of light so that everything in a shot is visible and equally lit low-key lighting is about leaving those shadows in and playing with the contrast between dark and light and so film noir uses low-key lighting consistently it's really kind of a misnomer because as you'll see on the faces of these actors they still have a very bright key light what it actually is is low fill and so the shadow is more harshly defined on them now this sometimes starts to blend into more natural lighting that we have nowadays where you can light a scene so that it more accurately replicates what a natural lighting condition might look like last but not least an important tool for directors of photography when lighting scenes are gels or filters in order to create colored light and what gels are is they're kind of like thin sheets of almost like plastic and they are a solid color red purple blue green and you can slide them over or tape them to a production light so that when that light is coming out of there it's coming out in the color of that gel that's it for mison sin everybody i will talk to you next week