Mise-en-Dungeness | Dungeness, UK | Unit 21 | 2021

Awarded First Class Honours

The project aims to explore an architectural approach to forming the mise-en-scène, applying this technique to create ‘hyper-authentic’ experiences of Dungeness.

Mise-en-scène is a cinematic concept used by filmmakers to create images that express style, narrative, and experience. At the same time, the natural scenery of Dungeness encapsulates characteristic visual qualities that evoke the cinematic perception, attracting many artists, photographers, and filmmakers to use it as the subject of their works. The film and photography of Dungeness has almost created its own unique genre and represented the regional culture.

The project explores how the spatial staging of the mise-en-scène through layers, frames and views could be applied as a process to construct architectural space. The inhabitation and distortion of this architecture creates aspects of the intangible and blurred within each constructed moment.

The programme is a film studio that promotes the filmmaking technique as a way to preserve and grow the local culture. Borrowing the vision from a filmmaker, the process and narrative of architectural design is structured as if it were an ongoing filmmaking event. When the journey of Mise-en-Dungeness begins, the connection between architecture and film becomes obscured. This is a moment of crystallisation between the real ‘Dungenessness’ and the imagined that is in constant shift and identification.

Project 1: Cinematic Transcript of Dungeness

The preliminary investigation explores and refines the unique context of Dungeness through translating Derek Jarman’s The Garden into a series of imaginary staging landscapes.

The Zoom-In Experience

The four-level design strategy considers varying scales and materialities, creating the immersive Mise-en-Dungeness experience from outside-in.

Final Film: Mise-en-Dungeness