Diegetic Sound:
When the teacher is speaking to the entire class in the very beginning of the show, that is diegetic sound. The entire audience can hear her speaking and it’s not coming from off camera or showing that it’s an internal sound dialog. It is also an external diegetic sound since all of the characters can hear.
Non-Diegetic Sound:
After the teacher has asked Buffy to lie on the desk, the man comes up to kiss her. Once they get more involved in the kiss, dark, stormy music starts to play in the background. Wind sounds like it is blowing about and thunder erupts. All of this is non-diegetic because it’s creating an atmosphere and ambiance and isn’t sound that all of the characters in the scene can here. It comes from off camera.
This creates a dark, mysterious tone and the eeriness is instantly felt through the tonal structure of the music.
Mise-en-scene:
I will describe this about when the man with the creepy hands comes into the scene and opens the box which he seems to trap people’s souls in. It uses diegetic sound in the way of the box closing, but the whispers of the souls as they are slipping out of the bodies uses non-diegetic sound to show that it’s happening off camera, and out of the character’s audibles.
- Production Design: sets, props and costumes – There is makeup on the hands of the character that are very old and almost skeletal. They look creepy and instantly conjure a feeling of repulsion and fear – like you know this character is up to no good. The box and even the way the hands move are gloomy and seem as if there is an aspect of magic about them. Dark magic. Of course it’s portrayed fully when the camera pans back after he closes the box and you see that it’s a skeleton-like vampire with dark, sunken eyes and very sharp, scary features.
- Colour (present in both production design and lighting) – in this scene it gets dark. It goes from being bright and colorful when Buffy is in class or they’re outside, to a much bleaker scene.
- Lighting – As I touched on in the color, things go dark and the lighting follows suit. It gets darker and hence leads you to think there is danger a foot in the scene. It instantly felt like to me that this was going to be a scene where the monsters and creepy crawlies were going to lurk into the episode.
- Actors’ performance (including casting and make up) and movement (blocking) – The monster serves to just give a dark mood and the hands move slow and with a scary factor to the slow, methodical way they float over the box. He stands off camera so just the attention is on the hands and the box. The characters all lie relatively motionless in their bed and just make little diegetic sounds through their moans as the souls slip across their lips. It then pans back to the monster who closes the box and we finally see that he is as evil and scary as we might have first thought with the hands.
- Framing including position; depth of field; aspect ratio; height and angle (but not movement) – There is little movement and for the most part, the monster is off camera right until the commercial break. The humans who have their souls stolen are framed in tight and the camera zooms in so you can see their mouths opening and the diaphanous soul escaping their lips. The movement is fluid and almost if you’re floating through the scene.
Hello Shonna! You really did a good job on finding examples for diegetic sounds, non-diegetic sounds, and mise-en-scene. From your description about the instances, I could even see the actors acting. You mentioned that the non-diegetic could make dark or mysterious tone for the video. I do agree with you! The non-diegetic sound could drag people in the story quickly and let them have the same feeling about the figures in movies or videos. Non-diegetic sounds somehow like the catalyst of the movie because they strengthen people’s feeling and let them experience the figure’s experience in the movies or video.
Thank you for your sharing and looking forward on more opinion about the diegetic sounds and their function in the movie or videos!
Nice post Shonna! You went into perfect detail describing each element of the miss-en-scene film technique. Each of them were easily visualized. I think the lighting has a huge amount of impact on a movies horror characteristics. You could have every other horror making element but if the scenes were filmed during the day the film wouldnt be scary at all. I think horror films thrive on the darkened lighting and it is interesting that it effects us so much as humans.
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Karya Bintang Abadi