The Wolf of Wall Street

The goal of this project was to translate a film into a book by expressively using typography and no images from the actual film. I chose to do the Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorcese’s film adaptation of Jordan Belfort’s biography. Some of the reasons why I chose to do this film was to be able to portray it in a manner that the main point of the movie gets across. Since there was so much controversy with the film I thought it would be interesting to see how I could display it in the most formal way possible while keeping the dynamic elements from the film. To me, the message of the story in the film is so clear, especially when considering that it’s based on a reality of Wall Street in the late 80s/early 90s. I also thought it would be fun to deal with something so exciting of a story as this, which is unlike me in personality. A fun challenge.

After a lot of deliberation and consultations with my professor, I decided that the best format for the book would be a magazine. I wanted for it to take on the form of what created the term “The Wolf” which was a magazine article. My main idea was to combine extravagant pictures and loud text to display the cockiness of the richness in the characters. I wanted the text and images to seem like cutouts at times to display a dis-construction throughout, as well as mixing it with legal forms-looking pages when the script was mainly dealing with business related topics. The combination of construction and deconstruction was mainly based on how Jordan Belfort was getting richer yet his life was falling apart. There was only so much that money could keep together and in the end he ended up in jail, regardless of his fortune.

My main focus with the typographic elements and pagination was to set the volumes effectively as well as the pacing. I felt as though the films narration and action were synchronized in a way that you can see even if you’re reading, so the spacing and pagination throughout were done according to the timing in the film.

The final product was 162 pages.