How to turn your boring movie into a Hitchcock thriller..... AM

STEP 1: It's the mind of the Audience

• Make sure the content engages them and reels them in
• Change everything in your screenplay so that it is done for the audience
• Use the characters to tease the viewer and pull them along desperately wanting more
• Hitchcock knew why people are drawn to a darkened theater to absorb themselves for hours with images on screen (do it to have fun)
• As a film director you can throw things at them, hurl them off a cliff, or pull them into a dangerous love story and they know that nothing will hapepn to them. They're confident that they'll be able to walk out the exit when its done and resume their normal lives. And, the more fun they have, the quicker they will come back begging for more (Gottlieb)
  

STEP 2: Frame for Emotion

• Emotion is the ultimate goal for each scene



• First consideration of where to place the camera should involve knowing what emotion you want the audience to experience at that particular time



• Emotion comes directly from the actors eyes



• Can control the intesity of that emotion by placing the camera close or far away from those eyes.



• A close-up will fill the screen with emotion, and pulling away to a wide angle shot will dissipate that emotion



• A sudden cut from wide to close up will give the audience a sudden suprise



• Sometimes a strange angle above an actor will heighten the dramatic meaning (Truffaut)



• These variations are a way of controlling when the audience feels intesity, or relaxation.
  

STEP 3: Camera is Not a Camera

• Camera should take on human qualities and roam around playfully looking for something suspicious in a room. This allows the audience to feel like they are involved in uncovering the story



• Scenes can often begin by panning a room showing close ups of objects that explain plot elements



• Everything changed drastically when sound finally came to film in 1930's.



• Suddenly everything went toward dialogue oriented material based on scripts from the stage



• Truffaut - Movies began to rely on actors talking, and visual storytelling was almost forgotten
  

STEP 4: Dialogue Means Nothing

• One of your characters must be pre-occupied with something during a dialogue scene.



• Their eyes can then be distracted while the other person doesn't notice. (Good way to pull audience into a character's secretive world)



• Hitchcock - 'People don't always express their inner thoughts to one another, a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person thinks or needs'



• Focus of a scene should never be on what the characters are actually saying - resort to dialogue only when it is impossible to do otherwise



• Hitchcock - 'In other words we don't have pages to fill, or pages from a typewriter to fill, we have a rectangular screen in a movie house,'
  

STEP 5: Point of Editing

• Putting an idea into the mind of the character without explaining it in dialogue is done by using a point-of-view shot sequences (subjective cinema) - You take the eyes of the characters and add something for them to look at



• Start with a close up of the actor



• Cut to a shot of what they're seeing



• Cut back to the actor to see his reaction



• Repeat as desired



• You can edit back and forth between the character and the subject as many times as you want to build tension (audience wont get bored)



• Have the actor walk toward the subject - switch to a tracking shot to shot his changing perspective as he walks



• Truffaut - 'The audience will believe they are sharing something personal with the character' - Pure cinema



• If another person looks at the character in a point-of-view they must look directly at the camera
  

STEP 6: Montage Gives You Control

• Divide action into a series of close-ups shown in succession



• Carefully chose a close up of a hand, arm, face, and gun falling to the floor - tie them all together to tell a story



• You can portray an event by shwoing various pieces of it and having control over the timing



• Hide parts of the event so that the mind of the audience is engaged



• Hitchcock - transferring the menace from the screen into the mind of the audience'



• Famous shower scene in Psycho uses montage to hide the violence - impression of violence is done with quick editing, and the killing takes place inside the viewers head rather than the screen



• Anytime something important happens, show it in a close up. Make sure the audience can see it
  

STEP 7: Keep the story simple!

• Simplistic, linear stories that the audience can easily follow



• Everything in your screenplay must be streamlined to offer maximum dramatic impact



• Each scene should only include those essential ingredients that make things gripping for the audience. - 'What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out'
  
  

Step 8: Characters Must Break Cliche

• Make all of your characters the exact OPPOSITE of what the audience expects in a movie
  
  
• They should have unexpected personalities, making desicions on a whim rather than what previous buildup would suggest



• Ironic characters make them more realistic to the audience, and much more ripe for something to happen to them
  

Step 9: Use humor to add tension

• Pretend you are playing a practical joke on the main character of your movie - give him the most ironic situations to deal with - unexpected gag, the coincidence, worst possible thing that can go wrong - all can be used to build tension
  

Step 10: Two things happening at once

• Build tension into a scene by using contrasting situations



• The audience should be focus on the momentum of one, and be interrupted by the other



• Usually, the second item should be a humorous distraction that means nothing



• E.g. when unexpected guests arrive at the hotel room in the Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day are in the midst of a tense phone-call. The arrival of the guests laughing and joking serve a dramatic counterpoint to the real momentum of the scene.
  

Step 11: Suspense is Information

• Information is essential to Hitchcock suspense; showing the audience what the characters don't see.



• If something is about to harm the characters, show it at the beginning of the scene and let the scene play out as normal



• Constant reminders of looming dangers will build suspense



• The suspense is not in the mind of te character- they must be completley unaware of it



• In Psycho (1960) we know about the crazy mother before the detective does, making the scene in which Balsam enters the house one of the most suspenseful scenes in Hitchcock's career



• 'The essential fact is to get real suspense you must let the audience have information' - Alfred Hitchcock
  

Step 12: Suprise and Twist

• Once you've built your audience into gripping suspense it must never end the way they expect
  

Step 13: Warning: May Cause MacGuffin

• The MacGuffin is the side effect of creating pure suspense



• When scenes are built around dramatic tension, it doesn't really matter what the story is about



• The MacGuffin is nothing - only reason for MacGuffin is to serve a pivotal reason for suspense to occur