Drinking Prop Creation

Drinking Prop Creation

In our genre, a common convention is having scenes of drinking/alcohol and smoking and if we were to not include anything of the such we would be subverting form common conventions which could effect the trailer as a whole.

Therefore, I decided to experiment with some drinks, hip flask and cigars that I had at home to see how effective they would to use in our trailer.

The first three images are the individual props themselves to see what they would look like if filmed with nothing else around them.

From this, it was clear to me that the hip flask works more effectively when on its own more than the bottles of Jagermeister.

I think is because for our genre of film, a hip flask is commonly scene as a man's personal mixture of drink that can be concealed, which conforms to our theme of secrecy  within the business sector. 

However, the bottles of Jagermeister would most likely work most effectively in the background of an office or study room, rather than being held and used explicitly by a character purely due to the nature of the drink, commonly being mixed in with other drinks rather than drunk straight.

On the contrary, when I experimented with the idea of pouring the Jagermeister into the hip-flask the shot and idea of the shot seemed to work relatively well.
As the aim of including alcohol is to show the dark side of business and the bad ways people handle it and I think a shot like this could work effectively.

Having realised the fact the, if we were to use these props that they would most likely be background mise-en-scene, I tried the approach of placing them in a nice aesthetic order to see how they looked on screen.

As it turned out, they do work together as whole and if they are position correctly, I can imagine them in the cabinet of a persons office or in a cabinet as home. But this shot will depend on location and also more people who store drinks have whiskey and scotch rather than Jagermeister so that is a problem there.

Then having seen some potenial success with grouping them together and concluding they would look good in a cabinet or something like one I did that.
I think this was not very effective because my cabinet/box is not big enough for everything and the shape and colour of it did not work as well as I had hoped, but I think in a wooden cabinet with glass doors this shot would work a lot more successfully. 

Moreover, in many crime drama films there are frequent scenes of characters smoking cigars, cigarettes and drugs. As I had some baby cigars I chose to use them as extra mise-en-scene due our narrative being more focused around drinking.

However, it turned out that with the baby cigar it did not really bring too much extra too the shot and would indefinitely work a lot better if our protagonist was filmed smoking one with or without drink/

Evaluation

• I believe we need to research more into the types of drinks as Whiskey and Scotch would be a lot more effective for our genre.
• The location of these alcohol would be vastly enhanced if it was in a club or bar because we need to present our protagonist as reckless and storing drinks in a nice cabinet subverts that stereotype.
• However, if we could obtain an office, placing these drinks or others would increase the creativity of our mise-en-scene while conforming to genre and the conventions within it.