The Setting first steps

So here is whats next. Now that we have the specific genre with our ideas organized, we have to establish the setting and the characters. I know for a fact is going to be hard to find a place that fits our schema for “creepy” more so when you live in Weston. So that's when we started brainstorming from our experiences. When we started to brainstorm we realized we have many things to discuss first before coming up with the setting, so we had to take a couple of steps back. We had to establish the time period before picking the place. We looked up information on steps to come up with setting and we found this useful website The Fundamental Elements of Setting, and for our surprise we only had two things of the 12 it lists in the article. After many mistakes and fails we were in square one. According to the article we have to first come up with the locale, here we looked for inspiration in famous thriller movies such as: The Silence of the Lambs, Seven, Inception and Zodiac. Each with unique settings had one specific feature: They each showed distress and settings that expressed non-conformity in society; in other words they all showed unique and remote places that were characterized by their unusual nature. That's when we started to realized that mise-en-scene is going to be huge part in our opening.

We looked everywhere for a place that reflected our genre, we also wanted to heavily tie up the personality of our character with the setting. At least now we have an algorithm and specific plan to come up with the place. Fortunately for us one of my partners had a very cool place we could film in, it had everything we looked for. It was isolated, was ruined down and it was a huge mess, Perfect! Now we have the locale, the next step is to come up with the time frame, we instantly knew we had to pick the future, mainly because of two things, if we did the past or the present we have to develop our story using reality which narrows our possibility, if we do the future we can come up with our own reality and it gives us more possibilities to explore. The time of day is also crucial for creating visual orientation on the screen, night time suits our genre better and will aid in the mood. Opening Scenes: An Overview, this article also helped us enlighten our ideas by showing us the “set up” for our opening scene. Here I learned two important rules, don’t open up with dialogue and force the reader to “backtrack” to make sense of what’s taking place in the scene.

This is the setting we are trying to create.







Carpenter, Courtney . "The Top 10 Elements of Setting In a Story." WritersDigest.com. N.p., 02 May 2012. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.

"Opening Scenes: An Overview." WritersDigest.com. N.p., 12 July 2011. Web. 19 Mar. 2017.