Alfred Hitchcock

By Ellie Trayling

Alfred Hitchcock was an English director and filmmaker. He established many elements of the suspense and thriller genres. Hitchcock had a successful career in British cinema and became famous as England's best director. Hitchcock is most famous for his film “Psycho” which was inspired by true events. His most famous scene in this was the shower scene in which he used a 50mm lense to avoid distorting the image as he wanted the audience to feel as if they were seeing those events first hand. He decided to create the film in black and white as he thought the shower scene would be too disturbing to watch in colour. In the scene the camera focuses on the front of the lady facing backwards to the shower curtain where you can see a suspicious shadow approaching her. The fact that there isn't any music playing at this point gives an eerie feel. The shadow is then revealed to be a man holding up a knife (this is when the music comes in) and immediately the camera zooms in on the lady's mouth to portray the horror. The camera then flicks back and forth from the murderer to the lady being stabbed. The high pitch music that is playing while this is happening symbolising the stabs. The camera follows the lady down in a slow, smooth motion and then slowly spirals outward from her eye to reveal her corpse on the floor and all that’s left that you can here is the shower still running.

Psycho The shower scene which was less than 3 minutes in the film took over 7 days to film and includes 70 different camera set ups and there are 90 cuts in the 45 second attack. Jack Russell the cinematographers job was to light each set up and move the camera around from shooting straight down to straight out, to cross angles and into the water. The shower head was made in the special effects department and the camera was tilted in such a way that the water never touched it.

They used chocolate syrup for the blood to make it stand out more in the black and white colour and stabbed melons to get the stabbing sound effect.

https://youtu.be/8VP5jEAP3K4

The BirdsHitchcock is also famous for the film “The Birds”. Another one of his most famous scenes is the crows on the playground which was also used in the film “High Anxiety” and directed by Mel Brooks.

The scene at the schoolhouse, with its menacing build and intense climax, proposes one of the clearest demonstrations of Hitchcock’s use of storyboards. As the schoolchildren are led in song by schoolteacher Annie Hayworth, Melanie waits outside, smoking a cigarette on a playground bench: but silently on the climbing frame behind, crows begin to gather. To attract the trained birds, the actors often had ground meat or anchovies smeared on their hands and the scene where the birds attack the schoolchildren was done using mostly puppet crows, along with a couple of real ones. The kids were running on a treadmill, with Bodega Bay footage added in the background.

https://youtu.be/ydLJtKlVVZw

The Birds story board : Play ground scene

The BirdsArtist Harold Michelson did the perspective shot from above the gas station fire on top of a mountain ( where universal theme park is now) and shot down towards the parking lot using a giant frame of glass, he outlined an area where people could run, then Albert Whitlock painted the surrounding scene. The perspective film was taken out and then put back into the camera with Wiltlock’s painting. They had to make it look like the birds were underneath so they separately filmed flying birds, then hand painted in the birds.

https://youtu.be/hplpQt424Ls

VertigoVertigo is a 1958 American psychological thriller film. The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John "Scottie" Ferguson. Scottie is forced into early retirement because an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia which is an extreme fear of heights and vertigo which is a false sense of rotational movement. The film was shot on location in San Francisco, California, and at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. It is the first film to use the dolly zoom. The dolly zoom is an in-camera effect that distorts perspective to create disorientation this is used to convey Scottie's acrophobia. As a result of its use in this film, the effect is sometimes referred to as "the Vertigo effect".

The dolly zoom technique gets used in the tower scene, where detective Ferguson is chasing Madeleine (Kim Novak) on old wood staircase. In the middle of the staircase, he looks down an gets dizzy/vertigo again.

https://youtu.be/GnpZN2HQ3OQ