Hitchcock's Style

The British Film Institute hosts a great web site, screenonline, the definitive guide to Britain's film and TV history. Director Alfred Hitchcock's early film work is the subject of Mark Duguid's article, Hitchcock's Style.


Speaking to Hitchcock's visual storytelling ability, Duguid writes:

"The limitations of the silent form led filmmakers to develop a visual language to enable them to say with images what they could not using dialogue or sound. By the time of the arrival of sound in 1927 (later in Europe) this filmmaking language had become so sophisticated that sound was felt by some to be almost unnecessary. Others - including Hitchcock - felt that the arrival of sound meant that something was lost to cinema. Directors were no longer forced to tell a story using images alone, and cinema's distinctively visual storytelling suffered as a result.

Throughout his career, Hitchcock continued to believe in cinema as a visual medium... when we think of Hitchcock we tend to remember images - the shower scene in Psycho (1960) or the handcuffed Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll in The 39 Steps (1935) - rather than lines of dialogue."

Unfortunately those of us outside the U.K. can't view the film clips included with the article. (Damn that revolutionary war anyway!)

In any case, a number of Hitchcock's early British films are available on Google Video. Here's his great The 39 Steps. (Let the clip play for a while. For some reason there is about 30 seconds of black leader before the film begins.)

Adobe Premiere Pro Keyboard Shortcut of the Week

It's been a while since I've posted one of these so here goes. The Track Select tool enables you to select all clips that exist on and after a certain time on one track, and then slide them to a new location in the timeline.


It's also good to know that by holding down the shift key, the tool selects the clips in all the tracks from that point.

The keyboard shortcut to access this tool is "M".

Color Correction Using Premiere Pro

Here's another video tutorial from studiodaily.com on basic color correction in Premiere Pro.


To learn more about color correction, I suggest you check out Stu Maschwitz's blog, Prolost. In this post, he demonstrates how flesh tones can be preserved while applying radical color changes to the rest of the shot.

Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

Here's the link for a new report from the Center For Social Media entitled, "Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video". Believe it or not, it isn't legal to wantonly lift video from the Internet and reuse it. There's a good chance that someone or some thing owns the rights to the piece you lifted.

This report clarifies the legal rights of online video makers and is certain to improve your understanding of fair use.


As their site states, "This document is a code of best practices that helps creators, online providers, copyright holders, and others interested in the making of online video interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances."

Thanks to KGA for the tip!

Reissue of "Touch of Evil" Coming in October

Today Wellesnet.com reports that a new 50th anniversary reissue of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is due this October. The new dual-DVD release will feature three versions of the film - a preview version, theatrical release version and the so-called "memo restoration" version. While the latter version is currently available, the new release will add audio commentaries by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, historian James Naremore, actors Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh, and restoration producer Rick Schmidlin.

Touch of Evil is a treat for film buffs and film students alike. The opening crane shot is considered among the best examples of visual storytelling around.

Check out this excerpt from the 1998 release -

Crane Shot Without A Crane

Here's a video that was posted on the Prolost blog in May. An easy camera move to achieve with equipment you probably already own.






Notice that in each of the examples, there is a window pane, a tree or some kind of foreground object to accentuate the effect. Have fun!

Adobe AVCHD Workarounds

Here's the link to an article at Adobe's Genesis project which lists software and/or hardware you can purchase in order to work with AVCHD footage in Premiere Pro.

While author Dennis Radeke argues these options are "solutions", it's quite obvious that these are actually workarounds since Premiere Pro and Premiere Elements cannot edit AVCHD in its native format.


These workarounds also cancel one of AVCHD's advantages which is the ability to copy files directly from the SD card to the edit computer. Instead, these so-called solutions reintroduce one of two time-consuming processes into your workflow, capturing footage from the camera (a real time process), or transcoding the files (which can be slower than real time and may reduce image quality.)

And lest we forget, any of these alternatives require the end user to spend more money to get Adobe's product to do what it should be able to do out of the box.

Sounds like a workaround to me.