Year 10 Sixth Sense Media Coursework
The psychological thriller sixth sense, released in 1999, gathered much attention after catching people’s breaths with a mind twisting story line. The film’s plot was cleverly constructed to make the audience believe a lie. A child psychologist, who was shot, helps a little boy with his problem-he sees dead people. It seems obvious what has happened, but with the directors use of camera angles, movements, and film techniques the audience is misled to believe the doctor is alive.
A key scene in which the director manipulates the audience through a number of techniques is that of doctor Crows first psychiatric session with Cole. The scene opens in a medium shot of Dr crow and Cole’s mother. As the establishing shot is very short we assume they have just been speaking. When Cole arrives home Coles mother takes a second or two to react; she greets him with a warm “Hey baby, how was your day” .A medium close up shot of Dr crow shows how he watches then sits back and smiles, it’s as if he is thinking “this is going well”. Cole explains his day as a fantasy. We see Dr crows reaction and assume he is trying to work out what he is going to be handling with. Coles mother decides to make pancakes and tells Cole he has an hour, really she means an hour to play or something, but we believe the hour is for a session with dr crow. As we do not see Coles mother for the rest of the scene we naturally assume she has left them to have the session in private.
