Deconstruction of Mise-en-Scene in Kidulthood

In this blog post, I will be looking at the mine-en-scene used in the opening title sequence of Kidulthood. Although we are creating a teaser trailer, we could still use aspects of the sequence as inspiration for mise-en-scene to use.

The opening credit sequence begins with a large amount of extreme close up, which are enigmatic and are conventional of the genre. The very first shot, as shown below, is an extreme close up shot of a football, with someone very clearly kicking it. This immediately implies the target audience, as this is an activity stereotypically expected of young males, approximately teenagers. This is then further anchored in the close up shots of teenagers in school uniform, talking with one another or on the phone.
Also, extreme close ups are shown of a mechanism being put together, which conveys a positive attitude towards the protagonist. However, this choice of shot also creates an enigma, as the audience are uncertain of what exactly is being constructed, and so when it is revealed that it is a gun, a negative tone is established. Also, the contrasting mise-en-scene of the gun with the school location is shocking to the audience, as it conveys a lack of innocence which is an unconventional representation of young people within the film industry, but is conventional for the social realist genre.

The use of guns in the mise -en-scene concerns a prominent issue in today's society - the increase of gun violence. However, as our film trailer will not be focusing on this particular issue, and from our target audience questionnaire we discovered that many did not appreciate the violent nature of films in this genre, we will not be including it.

Additionally, POV shots are interspersed during the opening scene, as seen below, and these further reinforce the realism of the narrative, hence making the audience feel more involved, and so for our teaser trailer we will aim to include these also.

Another aspect of the mise-en-scene in this film is drugs, which are a substance that are becoming an increasing concern in society. Through this, we can see how it is conventional for films in this genre to focus on topical issues, which allows the audience to reflect on society, and so this should be the main purpose of our own teaser trailer.

The location of this film is set on an estate, which is very conventional for social realist films as it portrays the discrimination and divide of the classes, a concern that is propagated by the media daily. Our target audience survey discovered that this is the location that our target audience would most like our teaser trailer to be set in. However, my location scouting of an estate found that it had more disadvantages to filming there than it did advantages, and so we ruled this out.

Evaluation
After deconstructing the mise-en-scene in this preexisting social realist film, we have discovered aspects we may attempt to include in our teaser trailer, such as the use of POV shots to reinforce the sense of realism. However, as this film focuses on gang violence, a lot of the mise-en-scene used is not helpful to us, as we aim to eliminate any violence from our teaser trailer.