Mise-En-Scene: Props and Costume

Props:

 

Knife - The simple kitchen knife became a complete nightmare thanks to Psycho's shower scene and has forever been used in other films as a pastiche of the film, such as in Scream (Craven, 1996), and so is a must for this scene. One, like the knife shown below, is the ideal style of knife that I will use, as it is large and so will be the focal point of the shot in which the knife is brought up during each stab.

 

 

Costume:

Norma Bates: Norma Bates is designed to be the classic over-protective mother, although we later find out she is dead, and this is reflected in her costume. Even during the shower scene the audience are never allowed to see a great deal of Norma, mainly to avoid the huge final spoiler, however when we reach the finale of the film we see much more, with the shot of Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in full costume wielding the knife in the cellar scene. However for my production of "Arbogast Meets Mother" the costume will be different from the old night gown and the grey fraying wig, as in modern films older women do not tend to wear clothing in the same style that was seen in the original Psycho, and so the costume will more likely be some form of baggy t-shirt and jeans, with a wig that is less grey.

 

Milton Arbogast: Arbogast is, as Hitchcock said, "smug, glib, tenacious, slightly dull" (Rebello, 1998) and this needs to be emulated within his costume, and a suit fits this perfectly, as it is a sign of authority yet still has a hint of the everyman too.

 

Plans for October Half Term

Getting an actor:
I have had quite a few people offer their services to play the part of Arbogast, and so now I need to decide who will do it. To narrow this down I have decided it will need to be someone who is also at my school, as to have the effect of the projected background I may need to use a school projector system and so it will be easier to have someone from my school to do so.

Primary shots:
During this period I am planning on getting a majority of the shots done. One shot I am concerned with is the dolly zoom, as from the previous test shots I have taken I have found it to be an extremely difficult effect to do with a DSLR camera due to have to walk back with the camera whilst simultaneously zooming in, which is much harder as the zoom on a DSLR is manual and difficult to rotate in a smooth way.

Test Footage of Effects

Dolly Zoom

 

 

This is my first attempt at the dolly zoom, after quickly viewing a "How To" crash guide on YouTube, and though it is extremely shaky I am not unhappy with it. This is because in my naivety I did not use my tripod to help balance, and had not even thought about how difficult it would be to zoom in at the same time as moving,  which is the reason why the footage is so shaky.

 

When I showed the footage to one of my friends they gave me some advice that to get a smooth zooming effect, which is to wrap a broken rubber band around the zoom ring and pull, which will then start winding the zoom making it a solid zoom rather than when someone has to keep turning their hand which leaves the jerky look as it zooms.

Progress So Far: 23/10/13

So far in this project I have focussed on learning the way in which the original scene in the film was produced, and attempting to incorporate this into my own piece, which has been a struggle as I had preconditioned beliefs on how Psycho had been made, and after reading the section of "Arbogast Meets Mother" in Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Rebello, 1998) I was surprised to find out how different the process actually was, as I was sure that Martin Balsam was filmed simply walking backwards down the stairs, so when I found out that it was a projected screen I gained a greater awareness of the difficulties I may face during my own production.

I have also began to work out the location for the shoot and how I will have to rearrange certain aspects of the house to make it look more suspicious with a lack of items around. So far I have taken some shots for a location recce as well as test footage of certain effects, such as the dolly zoom (which will be uploaded in a later fully titled post).

Three Ending Styles

After looking into three ways of filming the ending to the short (dolly zoom, rapid editing and projected background) I have decided that I will film all three of these, as well as my own original way of ending. All of the versions will play out with the exact same beginning, but will change when Arbogast reaches the top of the stairs.

These are how the endings will work:

1. The Dolly Zoom

In this version Arbogast gets slashed across the face and falls to the bottom of the stairs, as he reaches the floor he stays on his feet, where I will use a dolly zoom effect in which the background zooms in to show the sense of death and realisation of what has just happened creeping up on Arbogast. The scene will then end with the classic shot of Norma Bates slashing Arbogast's fallen body.

2. Rapid Editing

Within this scene Arbogast is slashed across the face and as he falls the camera rapidly cuts from a matter of all different angles, as shown in the shower scene in Psycho. As well as making the scene more exciting and modern I believe this will make it an easier process to film, as I have had fears over the safety of the actor playing Arbogast if he genuinely has to go down the stairs backwards, and so filming little pieces of this each time and later editing them together will mean that the actor will be safe and when edited it will look like one take with many different angles.

3. The Projected Background

This is the version that is most likely a shot-by-shot copy of the original as I will record the footage of the stairs as if there were someone falling, and later use a screen projector at school to have my Arbogast actor stood in front of this, as he flails around pretending he has fallen.

4. My Original - The POV Shot

In my own version of how the ending should play out I believe that audiences should be given a look into the psychopaths eyes as he takes his prey, and so this shot would occur after Arbogast has first been slashed across the face and he begins to fall. I would film this by having the camera in one hand and a knife in the other, and as the actor makes his way down the stairs I will follow, occasionally thrashing the knife in front of the camera as if trying to still stab him as he falls.

Hitchcock Filming Techniques

Dolly zoom

 

 



The film effect used in Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958) is one that has many names, such as the dolly zoom, the Vertigo zoom and the Jaws zoom among others, as it is an effect that, although great when done correctly, is hard to do and also somewhat nauseating. The effect was first used in Vertigo to give audiences an insight into what James Stewart's character, John Ferguson, feels like upon reaching great heights and so we may feel just as ill. The effect has later been used in the likes of Jaws (Spielberg, 1975) and Goodfellas (Scorcese, 1990) to show the audience how the character is feeling, such as the use on Jaws shows that Brody's worst fears have dawned on him when a boy is attacked, and in Goodfellas when Henry Hill suddenly becomes worried that he may be known by the other gangsters that he's ratted people out to the police.





Rapid Cutting Rate

 

 

The use of rapid cutting within Psycho during the shower scene turned out to be one of the most memorable pieces of cinema history ever. Within the shower scene only two medium shots are used, at the beginning and at the end, and the rest of the shots are extreme close-ups (with 50 cuts in all). Many people believed this scene to be too violent when the film was first released, however it was pointed out to critics of the scene that at no point do we actually see the knife hit the flesh of Marion Crane, and it avoids the use of nudity. The effect works well because of this, as the montage from different angles gives the shot a more disturbing feel as we view the murder of someone from every different viewpoint possible.

 

Projected background

 

 

This effect is not one that was solely used by Hitchcock himself, but was used by most film studios of the time, such as MGM. However the use of a projected background is something that would have been used primarily for shots of characters in vehicles, as they did not have the technology or skill to the same shots on an actual road. Therefore the easiest thing to do was to take the footage of driving down a road, without any actors or vehicles, and then project this film onto a large screen with the actors now in front of the footage. Hitchcock then used this for the scene in which Arbogast is murdered by having a cinematographer film whilst walking down the stairs and then projecting this onto a screen, and having Martin Balsam sat in front of the screen, flailing his arms around whilst the camera also moved to make it look as if he were falling more violently.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (Rebello, 1990) Useful Quotes

"He should be going up like nothing's going to happen. You know, you don't just get killed for walking up the stairs." - Alfred Hitchcock

"The [shower murder] was done purely for shock, but Arbogast's killing was a piece of dramatics, almost a storyline that had to be very carefully followed." - Marshal Schlom

"we had Marty, sitting in a gimbal, flailing in front of a standard rear-projection screen" - Schlom