Analysis of thriller clip

Market Research- The Departed

This is a clip from the thriller movie "The Departed". In this clip Costello is quiestining Billy about who may be the rat. the costuime codes in this movie help the audience to understand who is incharge as Costella is wearing a clean cut suit, smoking a cigar, this is what the audience conventionally believe a mafia boss to look like, where as billy is looking scruffy tyring to represent as looking like a rat. Jump cuts are used to represent the intensity in the scene as it is a constant back and forth battle, it also helps to keep the audiences attention whilst watching this non conventional thriller scene.

The lighting in this scene is used to create suspense and a mode of interrogation for the audience, as the artificial light is a single spot light shinning down on the two characters faces, this is what we would conventional see in an interrogation scene, the fact that the two characters lean in and out of the light symbolizes when one character is speaking, and how has the power shifts from one character to another.

It is quiet easy to spot who is in charge through the use of over the shoulder shots, as when Costello is talking Billy is always in the camera shot as well, showing Costello's power over him, this helps the fact that this is an interrogation, on the other hand, Billy is always by himself in the shot, showing how he is vulnerable, all this adds to the suspense in the scene.    

The smoke from Costello's cigar, also creates a sense of enigma for the character, as it gives off the sense that he is hiding being this wall of smoke, as it is clear he is frustrated in the scene this gives the character depth instead of making him out to be a conventionally "gangsta" type character, as well as this the cigar does also conform to what our belief of what a mafia boss type character should look like, along with the suit and gray hair.

The character of Billy is constantly being portrayed as weak, shown in many of the pictures above, this is shown by his eye line which is point at the floor, this conventional shows weakness in a character, but the use of lighting to cover half his face, creating a sense of enigma shows that perhaps past events have made him become this, this is the sort of thing we which to achieve in our task.

The DVD cover of the Departed does conform to a conventional thiller DVD cover, as is uses dark colours, and low key lighting, in our porject we too are also going  to incoorparte this into our project, we are espically going to use the lighting to create a sense of engima so that our characters have depth to them, conforming to thriller protagnists