Alfred Hitchcock was an influential English film director known for establishing the suspense and thriller genres. His most famous film, Psycho, featured an iconic 3-minute shower scene that took over a week to film and included 70 camera setups and 90 cuts. Hitchcock also directed The Birds, known for its unsettling scene of crows gathering menacingly on a school playground. He pioneered innovative film techniques like the dolly zoom used in Vertigo to convey the main character's acrophobia.

1. Alfred Hitchcock
By Ellie Trayling

2. 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.

3. 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

4. The Birds
Hitchcock 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

5. The Birds story board : Play ground scene

6. The Birds
Artist 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

7. Vertigo
Vertigo 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