Alfred Hitchcock – Page 2 – Self Plagiarism is Style

52,000 frames of Hitchcock

Back in January, I set myself the task of reducing every one of the available major Hitchcock films down to 1000 frames of film.
Today, nearly 7 months later, I’ve finally finished 🙂

1000 Frames of Hitchcock

I’m guessing this is probably the largest online collection of images from Hitchcock’s films, with a total of 52,000 images covering a creative period of over 50 years, and taking up 3.76GB of disk space.
However, there’s still more work to be done! With the help of some fellow fans, I’m starting to catalogue the images — in particular, which actors are in each frame and what’s happening or what objects appear. It’s still early days, but here are some examples from the films that have been catalogued so far:

The images are also starting to be integrated into the actor/actress pages in the site (e.g. Tippi Hedren).
Also, inspired by a comment in Charles Barr’s “English Hitchcock“, I’ve begun documenting film credits as well intertitles from the silent films (e.g. Champagne).
The final thing I’ve been adding in the last week or so is content from YouTube. The aim is to have videos for each of Hitchcock’s cameo appearances (e.g. Vertigo), interviews (e.g. Picture Parade), and film trailers (e.g. Frenzy).
So, now you know why I’ve not been blogging much recently 😉

William Morris Gallery

Just spotted that the Waltham Forest Council is cutting back funding to the William Morris Gallery in London. I’m sure many of you will already be familiar with his work but, if not, check out the Wikipedia article.
If you are an aficionado of Morris’ work, then you might want to head over to the Save William Morris Gallery & Vestry House Museum website, where there’s a link to an online petition.
The architectural critic and writer Jonathan Glancey wrote an article in The Guardian this week:

The London borough of Waltham Forest says it needs to cut costs. …The aim, say many local people together with defenders of the gallery – including Tony Benn, and Morris’s biographer, Fiona McCarthy – is to prepare the way for complete closure.

Fans of Alfred Hitchcock might be interested to know that his birthplace of Leytonstone is part of the Waltham Forest borough, and is only about 3 miles from the museum.

1000 Frames of Hitchcock – part 6

And here’s the next batch of “1000 Frames of Hitchcock“…
Family Plot (1976) (60 seconds)

Rear Window (1954) (60 seconds)

Rope (1948) (60 seconds)

1000 Frames of Hitchcock – part 5

Here are the last two for this week…
Frenzy (1972) (60 seconds)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) (60 seconds)

I couldn’t resist using the frames from Uncle Charlie’s speech — as he speaks the final words, he turns and stares straight into the camera…

The cities are full of women, middle-aged widows, husbands, dead, husbands who’ve spent their lives making fortunes, working and working. And then they die and leave their money to their wives, their silly wives. And what do the wives do, these useless women? You see them in the hotels, the best hotels, every day by the thousands, drinking the money, eating the money, losing the money at bridge, playing all day and all night, smelling of money, proud of their jewellery but of nothing else, horrible, faded, fat, greedy women… Are they human or are they fat, wheezing animals, hmmmm? And what happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?

1000 Frames of Hitchcock – part 4

Here’s the next batch of “1000 Frames”…
The Birds (1963) (60 seconds)

Psycho (1960) (60 seconds)

Blackmail (1929) (60 seconds)

Waltzes from Vienna (1934) (60 seconds)

1000 Frames of Hitchcock – part 3 (Vertigo)

Here’s the next part of “1000 Frames of Hitchcock”…
Vertigo (1958) (60 seconds)

There’s also a breakdown of the average colour of each frame here:

Purists will spot that I’ve used the most recent DVD release from Universal, which has incorrect colours in the title sequence:

The Colours of North by Northwest

Colours, and the moods they evoke, play an important role in Hitchcock’s films.
With that in mind, I got ImageMagick to figure out the average colour of each of the 1000 frames for “North by Northwest” — you can see the results here.
To put the average colours into context, here they are annotated with a selection of scenes…

Getting the average colour of a given image got me wondering if it might be possible to do the same with the book cover scans on the OPAC. You could then virtually arrange and group books by their cover colours, in the same way that Huddersfield Public Library physically did last year:

(image courtesy of Iman’s photostream)

1000 Frames of Hitchcock – part 2

Here’s the next batch of “1000 Frames of Hitchcock”:
The Pleasure Garden (1925) (60 seconds)

Strangers on a Train (1951) (60 seconds)

North by Northwest (1959) (60 seconds)

1000 Frames of Hitchcock – Spellbound (1945)

Slightly inspired by Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho” video installation, here’s the first part of “1000 Frames of Hitchcock”:
Spellbound (1945)
…be warned, it’s a bandwidth hungry page!
The 1000 frames are fairly equally spaced and each represents a section of film lasting roughly 6 seconds.
Seeing as the next Dynix User Group Conference will be held in Barcelona, here’s a segment containing one of the Salvador Dali “Dream Sequences”:

And, just to really tax your bandwidth and overload your computer, here’s a page that tries to show all 1000 frames in just 1 minute:
Hitchcock in 60 seconds – Spellbound (1945)
…the page might take a little while to load!

Lego Hitchcock

I love Lego mosaics, so I thought this was really cool…

It’s by Nathan Sawaya — http://www.brickartist.com/alfred_hitchcock.html
There’s some really funky large sculptures on his site, including candy canes, a lego dress, and Han Solo in carbonite!
In terms of coolness, it’s up there with the CubeSolver and the 4 foot Lego Homer.
Those of you who aren’t easily offended might also want to check out The Brick Testament (also available in traditional book format).