Alfred Hitchcock Documentary Narrative

(Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, was an English film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres *Shot of Hitchcock*)

(*Shot of Shower scene* In order to capture the straight-on shot of the shower head, the camera had to be equipped with a long lens. The inner holes on the spout were blocked and the camera placed farther back, so that the water appears to be hitting the lens but actually went around and past it.)

(The soundtrack of screeching violins, violas, and cellos was an original all-strings piece by composer Bernard Herrmann entitled "The Murder." Hitchcock originally wanted the sequence (and all motel scenes) to play without music, but Herrmann insisted he try it with the cue he had composed. Afterward, Hitchcock agreed that it vastly intensified the scene, and he nearly doubled Herrmann's salary. The blood in the scene is in fact chocolate syrup, which shows up better on black-and-white film, and has more realistic density than stage blood. The sound of the knife entering flesh was created by plunging a knife into a casaba melon.

It is sometimes claimed that Leigh was not in the shower the entire time and that a body double was used. In an interview with Roger Ebert and in the book Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, Leigh stated that she was in the scene the entire time; Hitchcock used a live model as her stand-in only for the scenes in which Norman wraps up Marion's body in a shower curtain and places her body in the trunk of her car. The 2010 book The Girl in Alfred Hitchcock's Shower by Robert Graysmith contradicts this, identifying Marli Renfro as Leigh's body double for some of the shower scenes.

Another popular myth is that in order for Leigh's scream in the shower to sound realistic, Hitchcock used ice-cold water. Leigh denied this on numerous occasions, saying that he was very generous with a supply of hot water. All of the screams are Leigh's.

Hitchcock creates suspense and shock in the way he uses cinematography: camera position, angles, shots, colour, lighting, sound and music.)( *Changes to clip of North by Northwest* For example, in ‘North by Northwest’, Hitchcock creates a scene of suspense and shock in the plane scene. There is an extreme long shot of the sky and cornfield and Cary Grant who looks small and helpless, stands waiting. Then a plane tries to attack him. There is a long silence, and he looks for the plane engine. A truck approaches and Hitchcock uses the camera from ’s point-of-view of the truck coming closer until it is an extreme close up of the grill of the truck. This creates shock as the grill is coming towards Grant’s face and ours. There is a point-of-view shot of the plane. A close up of Grant shows us he is shocked and a cut to a long shot of the plane coming towards him builds tension. Grant dives under the truck and then there is a great big shock, when the plane crashes into the truck which is leaking petrol and there is a terrific explosion.)

(*Shot of Hitchcock*In my opinion, I believe Alfred Hitchcock was outstandingly excellent at creating suspense and shock in a number of ways especially in the shower scene, as we know “mother” is coming from behind, but Marion doesn’t since her back is facing the shower curtain. I preferred the film ‘Psycho’ as it was more successful in creating suspense and shock, since the film was made in black and white. This made it seem darker, scarier and creepy.

This being just one of the many reasons, Hitchcock is so credited and will never be forgotten.The murder of Janet Leigh's character in the shower is the film's pivotal scene and one of the best-known scenes in all of cinema history. As such, it spawned numerous myths and legends. It was shot from December 17 to December 23, 1959, and features 77 different camera angles.The scene "runs 3 minutes and includes 50 cuts. Most of the shots are extreme close-ups, except for medium shots in the shower directly before and directly after the murder. The combination of the close shots with their short duration makes the sequence feel more subjective than it would have been if the images were presented alone or in a wider angle, an example of the technique Hitchcock described as "transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience".)

Evaluation

Scenario

My scenario was ‘finders keepers’ based in which two people have a confrontation regarding lost vouchers.

My experience with in-Camera editing

I personally find that in-Camera editing is beneath my standard of film, however I feel that with the right practice and organization can be pulled of to a cinematic standard

Disadvantages of in-camera editing.

      1.    Less room for failure

      2.    Shooting in order

 What I have learned

D.W Griffiths - What contribution did the following have on film editing? (script)

 David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the epic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance(1916).

Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera and narrative techniques, and its immense popularity set the stage for the dominance of the feature-length film in the United States.

Griffith began his career, first as a failed actor, and then as a writer. It is here as a playwright that he found his first influences. His love for the works of Dickens and Tennyson gave him the idea of parallel stories within a single film as he began his career in directing. Multiple scenes of action "crosscutting" from one scene to another, first introduced in Griffith's ninth film The Fatal Hour (1908) and expanded later in After Many Years (1908), had never previously been attempted in film. He enhanced this crosscutting approach in The Lonely Villa (1909) by the use of intercutting between three separate groups of characters: a man, his wife and children, and burglers. Griffith followed the stories of each of the groups allowing the audience to witness the events unfolding from each of their perspectives until all three collide into the film's single narrative.

Griffith employed the crosscutting technique and combined it with shorter and more rapid shots, thus setting a rhythmic tempo and allowing him to sustain suspense within his movies. Griffith structured these films using parallel editing to enhance, and prolong the suspense of the sequence by continuously interrupting the progress of each line of action. This approach to editing influenced Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the development of montage editing, as well as the techniques used by future Hollywood directors in all genres

Motion picture legend Charles Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher of us All". This sentiment was widely shared. Filmmakers as diverse as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock^[22] Orson Welles, Lev Kuleshov^[23] Jean Renoir^[24] Cecil B. DeMille^[25] King Vidor^[26] Carl Theodor Dreyer^[27] and Sergei Eisenstein^[28] have spoken of their respect for the director of Intolerance. Orson Welles said "I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man."^[29]

In-Camera Editing

In Camera Editing Technique

FIGHT OVER VOUCHERS is the name of our piece.

We used a combination of different shots and styles with our piece. Though there was a totally of 3 different shots altogether, we used a variety of techniques. For example, over the shoulder, quick-pan, shot-reverse-shots and '2 shot'. We used close up shots and establishing shots to set what the whole thing is about.

Our piece is quite comedic, as it is intended to be. We intended to put a lot of suspense and tension into it by quickly changing the shots and keeping the pace fast.

Scratch disk

To create a scratch disk:

You need to configure Final Cut Pro so it will find the drive and the project folder where you will be capturing your video clips and creating your Final Cut Pro movie. The drive and project folder are called your "scratch disk," which could be a portable firewire drive on which you are storing all your video files.

1) Start Final Cut Pro.

2) In the menu at the top click on Final Cut Pro... System Settings

3) Then select the tab for: Scratch Disk Settings

4) Near the top of the screen that appears you'll see a series of checked boxes for Video Capture, Audio Capture, Video Render and Audio Render.

These should be checked so you can set all of them to the scratch disk drive and folder for your project (so when you capture your video and audio it will be stored in the right folder, and when you do rendering of your movie it also will be stored in the right folder).

5) To the right of those click on the button labeled Set and navigate through the computer's directory to your scratch disk drive. If you already have a folder for your project, just click on it. If you don't have a folder, then click on the New Folder button to create one and give a name to it.

For example, if you're using a portable firewire drive, click on Set and Choose a Folder to find the icon for the firewire drive on the desktop and open it.

6) You should now be back at the Scratch Disk Settings screen. This time look further down on the screen for the other three buttons labeled Set:

Waveform Cache Set

Thumbnail Cache Set

Autosave Vault Set

These are three other Final Cut Pro settings, each of which also should be set to the same scratch disk as the first one.

It is especially important that you set the Autosave Set button to the same scratch disk, as this is where Final Cut Pro will periodically save copies of whatever you're working on so you don't lose your work if the computer crashes. You want to be sure that these automatically saved files are being saved to your scratch disk drive and folder.

Make sure all three Set buttons have been set, and follow the same directions as above to useChoose a Folder to set each of these to the same scratch disk.

When you're done and back at the Scratch Disk Settings Screen, leave the default settings for the other options, such as Minimum Allowable Free Space on Scratch Disks, Limit Capture...Size and Limit Capture Now.

And click on the button at the bottom labeled OK. Now start a new project in Final Cut Pro by clicking on File...New and click on Save Project As... Give your project file a name and then navigate through the directory tree to the same scratch disk drive and project folder you used in the Scratch Disk Settings instructions above. Save the Final Cut Pro project file in that folder.

Once you've completed these settings, they are now stored in the copy of Final Cut Pro on the computer you're using.

The next time you launch Final Cut Pro, it will look for that scratch disk. If someone else has used that computer in the interim for a different Final Cut Pro project, they probably set it to use a different scratch disk. In that case at the prompt you'll need to reset the scratch preferences to your disk, as described above.

Why Scratch Disks Are Important:

Whenever you use your computer, your operating system frequently writes and retrieves information from a swap file on your main hard disk. The swap file is a temporary file that is created to help speed processing and applications and as a virtual replacement for RAM memory. Because not all data requires the speedy processing available with RAM memory, your computer is able to use a swap file for caching files that are not so processor intensive.
This means that data is constantly being written and retrieved from your computer's main hard drive. Because your computer's primary hard drive is used so much, it is not a good candidate as a scratch disk in Final Cut Pro. Rendering and other techniques used in video editing require a lot of processing power, and processes and other data actions occurring on the main hard drive would prevent efficient and timely rendering in Final Cut Pro. Thus, Final Cut Pro requires that a separate scratch drive be used for rendering and editing.