Shutter Island Trailer Editing

For this blog I chose the trailer for the movie “Shutter Island” by Martin Scorsese, because I think the editing made a huge contribution to the story telling in the advertisement. The way the shots are organized is to introduce the viewer to the story and build suspense from the beginning. The trailer is mostly made up of alternating close ups, long shots, and wide pans.


The first shot of the trailer is a ghost ship, which tells the viewer this is will be a scary movie, with a few quick flashes of hanging hooks and naked disturbed-looking people. Then, the camera pans through the gates of the asylum from the viewer’s point of view so it is as if we walk through the gate ourselves. Now, we are trapped on the island with DiCaprio. After that, the images become scarier, with multiple long shots of dark, leaky hallways, dramatic contrasts of light and dark in the lighting, and more close-ups of DiCaprio, where he looks stressed out, sweating, washing his face and panicking. There are alternating aerial pans of the island, with its jagged rocks and dark water, and shallow shots of drowned corpses or crazy inmates. The final shot is of a cliff, with DiCaprio’s hand barely hanging on.


In terms of composition, this trailer is excellent: even though the cuts are obvious, the viewer accepts them because of the story they tell. The long hallways, the dramatic contrasts, and the changes of the actor’s face all function to get the viewer interested in spending the $12 to see the rest of the movie. The trailer is edited specifically for this purpose, and it succeeds. It includes a narrative, builds suspense, and introduces a conflict, but gives no resolution. We want to know: will he pull himself up from that cliff? Will he get to the bottom of this mystery?


Click here to view "Shutter Island" video

Interactivity

The way I use media today is amazing and its accessibility and speed is unimaginable. Mostly, I enjoy the interactivity aspect of modern media. I use Yahoo to send mail to friends and family members and Skype to talk and see people who live far away. These types of media make it very easy to stay in touch with everyone; years ago, this kind of interaction took up a lot of time and money, but today it has gotten so easy and inexpensive! I also really like my cell phone. If the GPS in a car doesn’t work, I can look up directions on my phone, I can call and email people, I can listen to music, take pictures and videos, and it connects to the internet. On the internet, I also like to use search engines such as Google for everything from homework to movie show times, and look up information on Wikipedia. I also frequently visit news sites such as BBC, New York Times and the Associated Press. However, the type of media I use most often is television (CNN, Democracy Now).


Except for my blog, I don’t create web content, but I appreciate the fact that people can post information on the internet (such as the human-rights violation videos we talked about in class) because it gives regular people access to information that governments and corporations want to keep hidden. It really gives people a better opportunity to make decisions than we ever had in the past.


So, it looks like my relationship with media is mostly based on the idea of interactivity: I like to interact with the information available to me from media sources, and I like to be able to interact with people I care about using new media.