VISUAL AESTHETICS, MOOD & TONE

The house that we our filming the entire short in is quite a white washed house and gives quite a cold appearance due to its high ceilings, large rooms, white walls and cold colour palette. Because of this the visual tone that will come across will also be quite cold and almost bland. This is similar to in the film Silver Linings Playbook, filmed in a normal American neighbourhood, a lot of the backgrounds are quite plain and and bland. This film is an example of how a film can have these kinds of locations yet not come across as a very cold and depressing film, and it does this through lighting. Here the lighting is made to look very natural by have quite yellow lights shining in from outside the windows as if it was sunlight streaming in.

In our film we would like to make it obvious that the child is autistic, however without actually mentioning it. This means that we need to show through miss-en-scene that this is not just a child getting angry and having a meltdown, this meltdown is actually due to a condition. Through location we can do this by making the scenes in which the child melts down extremely clinical, a film that does this so well that it looks surreal is Rupert Goold's Macbeth. In these scenes of the weird sisters Goold makes the locations look so clinical that it looks surreal with the white-wash walls, blue/white colour scheme and bright white lighting. This is far more extreme than the kind of clinical look we would want in our film however it is a perfect example of how this style can enhance the strangeness of a situation, an in this example to the point that is it bizarre.

An idea taken from Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone is from the sequence where Marion Cotillard's character finally comes out of her house and the sun breaks through the clouds. The use of flares is very heavy meaning that the frame is filled with light, so much that is blinds the audience. This exaggerates the feeling that she has finally got out of the house and she's overcome by it all. This is an idea we could take for when Emma leaves the house towards the end of the film. She comes outside to take a break from it all and to enhance the difference between her life inside the house and outside it could work well to use flares as if her going outside is like a new beginning. This also helps make the audience believe that she may be walking out for good. This filming idea does require it to be sunny on one of the days that we film and since we have to film in October (or later in the year) it is quite possible this won't be the case. If is isn't sunny we will experiment with the exposure and other techniques to give a similar effect.

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