Setting the mood

Film's have features that help set the mood. Color, brightness, complexity, readability, and a host of other factors tell us how to feel when watching a film without the actor having to say a single word. In "The Way Films Feel: Aesthetic Features and Mood in Film", a study from Jussi Tarvainen,  Stina Westman, and Pirkko Oittinen, the three attempt to reveal how aesthetic features of film both relate to one another and contribute to a film's overall mood. 

"The set of low-level features described five concepts: brightness (bright—dark), colorfulness (colorful—colorless), loudness (loud—quiet), fastness (fast—slow), and smoothness (smooth—fitful). We so included the feature dialogue-based and music-based to study the significance of these aspects of film sound, and the feature rhythmic to investigate the little understood concept of film rhythm. The high-level features, in turn, described seven concepts: beauty (beautiful—ugly), complexity (complex—simple), familiarity (familiar—unfamiliar), interest (interesting—tiresome), pleasantness (pleasant—unpleasant), predictability (predictable—unpredictable), and understandability (understandable—unclear). Both sets therefore contained semantically opposite features...
Recent work in cognitive film studies and media psychology has shown low-level stylistic features of film to be instrumental in shaping viewer attention and cognition. Our study contributes to these findings by illustrating that low-level features also influence viewers’ aesthetic and affective impressions. We found low-level features to be related to the high-level aesthetic concepts of beauty, pleasantness, and interest, and to be better predictors of film mood than high-level features,"

Certain emotions can be attributed to various colors, sounds, locations, etc. I plan to manipulate these factors to evoke particular emotions during different parts of my film. These, coupled with the narrative music, will really help set the tone and mood.

Narrative music can be described simply as music that tells a story. Narrative music tells us how to feel without the actor having to say a single word. In a study by Johnny Wingstedt, Sture Brändström, and Jan Berg's study on narrative music in film they conclude that, "When image, dialogue, sound effects and music combine into multimodal texts, a 'chemical reaction' seems to take place. The resulting whole is, if maybe not greater, certainly different than the sum of the parts".

At any point of our lives the music we enjoy tells us who we are at that particular time. We enjoy different genres of music during various activities, moods, even times of day. I think that is really important to keep in mind when making this film. I also plan to have varying scenes move to the beat of the music, and vice versa. 

Getting excited.

Tarvainen, Jussi, et al. "The Way Films Feel: Aesthetic Features And Mood In Film." Psychology Of Aesthetics, Creativity & The Arts 9.3 (2015): 254-265. Academic       Search Complete. Web. 19 Feb. 2017.

Wingstedt, Johnny, Sture Brändström, and Jan Berg. "Narrative music, visuals and meaning in film." Visual Communication 9.2 (2010): 193-210.