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… (read more)
Here’s the next batch of “1000 Frames of Hitchcock”: The Pleasure Garden (1925) Strangers on a Train (1951) North by Northwest (1959)
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”:
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).
Following on from the first part of the guide, here’s the low down on the rest of Hitchcock’s films from the 1920s. In the US, virtually of the DVD releases of the following films have been lower quality budget “public domain” discs. Whilst these are a cheap way of getting hold of the films, you’ll probably be disappointed with the video quality. 4) The Ring (1927) By far the best transfer to date is in… (read more)
Welcome to the first part of my guide to Hitchcock on DVD! Introduction I’ve been running the Hitchcock DVD Site for over 3 years and, in that time, I’ve built up a collection of nearly 200 Hitchcock DVDs. Over the course of the coming weeks and months, I’m going to try and cover Hitchcock’s entire career and, at the same time, discuss which are the best DVDs to buy. To build up the best collection… (read more)
Yikes — it’s 2 months since the last Hitchcock update, so here’s the latest news! Finally! After years of craptastic “public domain” releases from the likes of Laserlight and Brentwood, fans in the USA should be getting some decent transfers of Hitchcock’s early films. Lionsgate Home Entertainment will be releasing a 3 disc box set on 06/Feb/2007. The upcoming UK Optimum Releasing box set (scheduled for the end of January) has been expanded and now… (read more)
The desktop wallpaper this week is a poster from “Family Plot“: (click to view different resolutions) On the wiki, I’ve started adding Hitchcock soundtrack albums. Over at the BBFC site, they’ve just classified “Number Seventeen” from Optimum Releasing. Also spotted that they’ve classified “Downhill” from Sound & Media — the running time matches the transfer used in the excellent German Concorde box set, so fingers crossed that we’re going to get a decent transfer in… (read more)
I’ve stated adding a weekly Hitchcock desktop wallpaper to the new wiki, so I’m going to try and get back into the habit of regular Hitch related blogging at the same time. The wallpaper this week is a poster from the 1936 film “Secret Agent“, starring John Gielgud, Peter Lorre, and Madeleine Carroll: (click to view different resolutions) October 1st sees the French release of Bon Voyage & Aventure Malgache by Éditions Montparnasse. I spotted… (read more)
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted something Hitchcock related on the blog, so here’s the first in an infrequent series of Hitchcock/Simpsons comparisons that I’ve just added to the wiki. To start off, there’s “Saboteur” and “Three Men and a Comic Book”: And secondly, here’s “Psycho” and “Itchy and Scratchy and Marge”: (click on the images to view larger versions in the wiki)
