Sea Cliffs: A Senior Mise en Scene Illustration by Elise Vanderlip (2012)

For my mise-en-scene, I portrayed my character Astrid standing on a sea cliff. As she walks along the shore, she thinks about the fragility of life and the illness of her father. Suddenly, peering over the stony ledge, she sees her father's face reflected in the water. She sees her father walking along a sea cliff just like the one she stands upon and she watches as he walks too close to the edge and falls. She knows, although no source but her own mind can tell her, that her father is gone. In that moment, Astrid realizes that she is completely alone. And without any attempts to make friends or branch out, Astrid will become a shadow of a human. To emphasize Astrid's sudden loneliness, I placed her in the very far left of the picture. Her figure is a dark silhouette to demonstrate the shadow she could become with the loss of human contact she has upheld only holds with her father. Her tiny body shows her social and emotional fragility. The sun is going down in representation of the ending of one chapter in Astrid's life.