Face Charts and Costume For Our Characters!!

As part of Mise-En-Scene, Makeup and Costume can play a big part in a movie. Costume can helps the audience to identify someones personality, occupation or even social class. Makeup, just like costume, can also help you define someones personality or social class, however makeup and costume are not particularly obvious to the audience but it is a great way of getting subtle hints across.

We decided that we  would make Face Charts and Costume sketches to help us in defining our characters more. Below is some pictures and descriptions on why we have decided on these choices:

This is our first face chart and costume sketch which is for our 'Old Man On Bench'.

In terms of outfit we chose fairly dark colours, although it doesn't show that on picture because of a flash, which represents/reflects his dark intentions in the scene. It is also an outfit suiting for his age of about 40-50, Simple shirt and sweater vest, Chinos and Brogues. This is a stereotype that conforms with all other movies of the same genre and concept as ours. So we thought this was very fitting. As for makeup, we will use shading to emphasise his wrinkles and stippling sponges to add the effect of stubble. Unfortunately we had to cast a man of 17 to play this character so makeup will play a huge role in our Male character. He will also have out of control eyebrows and glasses which could reflect his attitude to the way he looks. This also conforms to some of the stereotypes we researched about.

This is our second face chart and costume sketch which is for our 'Mother'.

In terms of outfit for our Mother character we kept it very simple and clean, this is because the mother is not the main focus of the particular scene so we do not feel she should be wearing amazing clothes. We decided a plain top, probably long sleeve, and jeans with converse/trainers would be good as it is not too done up and is something any 'Older' mother would wear, this outfit also appear to be quite common with lots of Motherly film roles. We kept makeup at a minimum as It conforms to the stereotypes we looked into, but we also decided on shading to make her face appear gaunt as if she is tired which could link on into the further storyline beyond the opening scene.

This is final character sketch for the character of the 'Daughter-Victim'. A face chart was not needed for this character as she is young and doesn't need to wear makeup in our opening scene.

The outfit we decided on for the Little Girl in our scene was again basic and conformed to stereotypes we had seen in other movies, most of the children were kept very "Children-like" and didn't really wear fashionable clothes, we chose a white long sleeve top, jean skirt, white tights and little dolly shoes. We chose a white top and white tights to show the child's innocence as white is seen as purity and a skirt was chosen as it is a typical girly piece of attire. We wanted to keep our character looking as 'childish' as possible because if she was wearing slightly older looking clothes it would not conform to our concept of movie. As mentioned above makeup is not needed for the little girl. This is because she has a young youth-full face to begin with but also because in our opening sequence we don't not see the young girls face because it matches with the end of the storyline.

As a group we based all of these character facecharts and ourfit sketches on previous research we had done, paying close attention to character costume and how it reflects personalities and subtle hints in movies. This will hopefully help us to understand our characters more and hopefully the audience will take notice of the costumes to help identify what might happen in the following shots or storyline.