life of a girl with a blog: Day 6: Mise-en-scene

Hello hello!! Welcome or welcome back to the blog! Today I'll be telling you about my favorite project so far in AICE Media Studies: the Mise-en-scene project.

For this project, we worked in groups of 4-5 and were assigned a one-line character description. The goal of the project was to develop a presentation about this character where we designed everything about the character. We had to create it's name, background, and develop it based off of the one-line description. For this project, my teacher gave us a lot of creative freedom. We were allowed to create the components however we deemed fit. The only components that were required were:

Avatar: see paragraph 5
Description of the character: see paragraph 4
Audio element: see attached Spotify links
Tactile element: see attached pictures
Mood board: see attached pictures
Setting: see attached pictures

My group were assigned the description:

A high school athlete with a secret passion for poetry. Torn between expectations and self-expression, he learns to balance ambition with authenticity.

For our character, we decided on the name Brady Beckham. He is a high school senior, who plays football and has had a passion for poetry since 7th grade. Brady seems tough on the outside but is secretly soft on the inside, once you get to know him. He struggles to figure out where he wants to go for college; whether he wants to go to one to focus on football or poetry.

To make Brady come to life, we used a website called ArtBreeder. It uses AI to create the character, but as long as you choose the option of creating the character yourself, you have full control over the avatar. I will say that the website is a bit finnicky and I probably won't be using it again because I'm just not the greatest fan of it. We wanted Brady to have green/colored eyes and brown hair, and the other details we weren't too concerned about. This is how Brady turned out!

On presentation day, each group had a station and they set it up however they wanted. Each group would rotate to each station after 8 minutes so that we could experience all 6 other presentation. During the set-up, I was taking another AICE exam, so I'm not sure how my group chose to display everything at the station.

To create Brady my group actually stemmed from stereotypes. The high school football player trope usually consists of having brown hair, being Caucasian, and are seemingly tough on the outside as portrayed by the media. Because us, teenage girls, were the creators there was surely bias on our part because we wanted to make our High School Musical fantasies come to life.

The process of creating Brady and his world didn't take very long because we split the work pretty evenly among ourselves. One person worked on the setting, one on the avatar, mood board and so forth. Although we split ourselves up, we collaborated well with each other by checking to see what the other group members thought and making sure that all our voices were heard in making the final product. Our outcome was fantastic in my opinion. We had playlists that Brady would listen to either to hype himself up before football games or to gain inspiration for his poetry. Our tactile element was a journal that he used as a playbook as well as for poetry. One of our group member's older brother played football, so we used his jersey for part of our tactile element and made sure the their numbers matched.

Below are the links and pictures for all of our elements!

Football hype playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0lz05rotWNidE2OST3vYS5?si=a134d0cf1beb47d4&nd=1&dlsi=2825aeb0e8df4bd7

Poetry playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3s8IaGIW3pkCyWddG7xhbO?si=85b86266fb5f4a8b&nd=1&dlsi=54fefa6436dd41cc

Tactile elements: We brought in a journal and made the pages look like it was Brady's personal journal where he jots down ideas and plays. Here is the inside cover, a sample of one of the pages and a love letter from his girlfriend, Gia, describing Brady.