Existing Product Research - Pan's Labryinth

Pan's Labyrinth

This scene diverts from the key conventions of the fantasy genre, as usually, bright colours and high-key lighting is associated with Fantasy, but this film uses exactly the opposite. Instead, the film uses bluish dark colours and a combination of high light saturated colours to create this dark mystical place. The Low-key green tinted lighting in the scene, which comes from the moon, creates a mysterious, sinister and surreal atmosphere, hinting at the unsettling, and slightly depressing Gothic fairy-tale plot. 

Extensive make-up has been applied to create Pan the faun from head to toe, having been designed after the god himself, and adds a sense of surrealism, adding the Gothic, mysterious and mythical element to the film, and emphasises the fact that the film is a Gothic fantasy. The director wants the creature to be immaculately designed in order to look real and believable to the audience. And from the simple poor clothing of the girl, we can estimate the time period she came from, and the fact that she wants perhaps, wants to escape to a world of fantasy or dream of one, because reality destroys her hope. Fairies can be seen fluttering around the young girl, shining. 

The non-diegetic cinematic music is very stylized, built to make the fairy-tale element of the film even stronger. It is mysterious and full of dramatise, which is contrapuntal to the scene at hand. This music hints that the young protagonist is on a dark mysterious adventure. The diegetic flutter of magical fairy like creatures can be heard all around the young girl, which sounds almost mechanical, adding to the sense of surrealism. The deliberate use of having hardly any sounds, except for the main character speaking as she continues to walk builds up tension. From the diegetic speech from the Faun, we immediately understand that it is a foreign film with subtitles underneath. The Faun's diegetic speech is very interesting as it seems to have a had a lot of layers added to it, especially with being in the fairytale world, where there are lots of animalistic and crawling sounds and noises added to create an affect of the underworld.