summer assignment - Antonia

Summer assignment:

 I decided to research the director martin Scorsese as he is a very well known director and a enjoy a lot of his work. The three films I chose to reference are the wolf of wall street, Hugo and Shutter island, which is in the thriller genre.

 I fist watched the film Hugo. It is about a young boy who is fixing a metal robot. As he is finding the parts to fix it he makes friends with a young girl and together they travel across Paris on many adventures until he comes across the girls uncle , who used to be a film maker. After meeting the uncle he realises that he has all the secrets to the robots design/make. The film Hugo is a family film, but is also an adventure/mystery. Martin Scorsese had a lot of success with this film as it won many awards of which 5 were Oscars. The budget for this film was $170,000,000 but in less than a year of its release it made $73,820,094. I liked this film as even though it was a family film it used jump cuts to create suspense within the mystery of the film. In the opening of the film Scorsese has used an establishing shot to show the audience where the film is set. This shot slowly zooms out to show a view of Paris. Scorsese has also used a low angled shot. This is when the main character Hugo is hanging form the clock tower. This shows how small he is, compared to the building and how high up he is. This shot suddenly jumps to a close up of the clock arm moving. This leaves the audience in suspense as we are left on edge to see if the actor falls.

The second film I watched was the wolf of wall street. It is set in the 1990's and follows the life of a mans rise to a wealthy stockbroker. This film stars Leonardo DiCaprio which is a frequent recurrence

within Martin Scorsese films.  This film uses many quick changing shots, not for suspense, but to add to the excitement and fun that's happening on screen. Scorsese has used bright, colourful lighting to contrast with the dull, boring you would associate with stock brokers. Scorsese uses very long shots so you see the chaos behind the main actors.

The final film I watched  was in the thriller genre and was called shutter island. This film was set in 1954 and is about a marshal investigating the disappearance of a murderess, who has escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane. This film is again starred by Leonardo DiCaprio. I liked this film because it used a lot of jump cuts to create suspense and left the audience on the edge of their seats. It uses close up shots to show the madness of each character and the lighting to add to the dark, tense mood. This won 5 awards since its release in 2010.