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 :-)
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:
- Cary Grant and Grace Kelly together
- kissing
- food/eating
- James Stewart on the telephone
- Janet Leigh driving
- knives
- looking towards (or just past) the camera
- pointing
- female legs
- alcohol
- newspapers
- mirrors
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 ;-)
Is it possible to tell the story in, say, seven frames? Based on a very quick glance at rear window I bet it’s quite easy
PermalinkI bet £10 it would look like Mr L.F. Dibley’s original version of “Rear Window” (Monty Python sketch)!
PermalinkI’ve been messing around the thumbnail images and (again, inspired by “24 Hour Psycho”), I’ve come up with:
24 Hour Hitchcock
If you leave it running, it’ll show all 52,000 thumbnails and it’ll take just under 24 hours complete :-D
If you’re running Internet Explorer, you might prefer this version of the page, which fades each frame into the next.
The other thing I thought of doing was to create a movie file of the thumbnails. If you were to run them at 25 frames per second, you’d be able to watch all of Hitchcock’s films in just under 35 minutes!
PermalinkHi there – this is fantastic!! You’ve done an amazing thing!
I was wondering you were familiar with a technology called seadragon (http://livelabs.com/seadragon/), which let’s you zoom all the way to a one full-resolution photograph from your aggregated film strip – it might be a great way to show your amazing work.
Thanks again – very impressive!
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