Digital News: Studio Setting/ Mise-en-scene

Now that we are getting to grips with our stories, we decided to discuss about our general tone and mise-en-scene for our news chanel studio.

What should our studio look like?

Instead of following the conventional large-spaced, simple studio which you can see on big news channels such as BBC, ITV, etc, we decided to go for a studio which relates much more with our target audience - students.

But how can we do this? Rather simply actually. We thought what if we set the studio up exactly how you would expect a student to set one up? This means having a lack of budget (which my group and I have anyway, as we are actually students) and equipment/technology which news channels have.

So instead of your conventional studio, we decided to put our studio actually in a typical and iconic student room. This means an untidy, messy room, filled with educational sheets scattered everywhere, empty alcoholic bottles from pre-drinks before they go out, maybe even empty cigarette packets, etc.

Example of a typical student/young person's bedroom. 

We want our studio to be iconic for the student life, something which is instantly recognisable and which creates a recognisable environment for our audience, generally making them feel more comfortable thus being invited towards our news reports. For our background we could have an intentional 'tacky' background - perhaps a bed sheet saying 'student news' or even what our news brand is called (however we don't currently have a name yet).

The only problem we might have with this is that we don't want our news channel to be taken as a joke. It needs to have some boundary line which distinguishes the difference between a parody of a news channel, compared to an actual student news channel. This doesn't mean that our studio can't be funny, it simply means that it must have some level of serious (however very low) so that the students actually take interest in our channel and not laugh at it.

Nonetheless, we need to make sure that the studio's miss-en-scene has a deliberate layout in terms of having the studio in a student room. We need to create this clear distinction between a student and just a general messy room - this can be done by using symbolic student props. For example, reading books, notes, a laptop, etc.

Also, the mise-en-scene can't be too distracting otherwise it may limit people's concentration with the news stories themselves. This means that we should use as little props as possible to reduce this chance of becoming distracted, however it must still be able to be recognised instantly.


We will continue to work on our mise-en-scene and I will make a post showing what we want our studio to look like, or examples like it.