Filmmaking is one of the most competitive fields on the planet. In
order to have any chance in heck of making it, you need more than
just talent (though that certainly helps).
You need an inside track and some expert advice.
This free report that you are now reading, is going to give you just
that. In it, you will be getting some of the best tips from some of the
greatest filmmakers of all time including…
Steven Spielberg
Quentin Tarantino
Sam Raimi
Alfred Hitchcock
David Hoffman
The information in those reports is priceless. I hope you will use it and
take the advice in it to heart. These are people who obviously know
what they’re talking about.
Kirby Dillard,
movietraining.net
Film Making & Movie Training Secrets - Alfred Hitchcock
1. Top Experts Film Making Secrets
By
Kirby Dillard
Movietraining.net
2. Introduction
Filmmaking is one of the most competitive fields on the planet. In
order to have any chance in heck of making it, you need more than
just talent (though that certainly helps).
You need an inside track and some expert advice.
This report that you are now reading, is going to give you just that. In
it, you will be getting some of the best tips from some of the greatest
filmmakers of all time including…
• Steven Spielberg
• Quentin Tarantino
• Sam Raimi
• Alfred Hitchcock
• David Hoffman
The information here is priceless. I hope you will use it and take the
advice in it to heart. These are people who obviously know what
they’re talking about.
So without further delay, let’s get to our experts…
3. Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock is a legend…plain and simple. I had to hunt long and
hard for some of his top tips. Here they are.
You might as well learn from the greatest master of all.
STEP 1: It's the Mind of the Audience
Hitchcock says that nothing is more important than getting into the
mind of the audience. You have to sit down and think how each scene
is going to affect the person watching. Will it make them happy, sad,
angry, what? This has to be thought out for each scene. You want to
make sure that what you write hooks them. There should be no
moments where they want to leave the theatre to get a snack. Make
them want more with each passing minute.
Hitchcock understood that people went to movies to have fun and that
no matter what happened, nothing would actually happen to them. So
you could have people falling from planes, cliffs or whatever, and it
would be okay. In other words, take them on the wildest roller coaster
ride they’ve ever been on.
STEP 2: Frame for Emotion
Emotion, whether it is fear, laughter, surprise, sadness, anger,
boredom, or whatever, is the ultimate goal of each scene. When
placing the camera, you want to first decide what emotion you want to
invoke as each camera angle will invoke a different one. The closer
you are to the character’s eyes, the greater the emotion. The farther
away, the less the emotion. By changing from a far shot to a close up
gives the audience a sudden surprise.
This is how Hitchcock mapped out every scene. if you watch his
movies you will see him use changing camera angles within a scene
quite often. He says it’s the same as composing music. He mixes up
the angles he way a composer mixes up his chords and melodies.
STEP 3: Camera is Not a Camera
The way Hitchcock played with the camera was pure genius. He said
that the camera should not act like a camera, such as being in one
4. place. It should follow the actors around the room and be like another
actor. This makes the audience feel like they are more involved in
what’s going on.
Hitchcock got this technique from his days in silent movies. Without
actors speaking words, he had to rely on camera movement to tell his
story. This works just as well with today’s movies and it’s a technique
many movie makers have copied.
STEP 4: Dialogue Means Nothing
What Hitchcock did is while the actor was saying his lines, he had the
actor move his eyes around the room as if distracted. This pulled the
audience into the character’s secret little world.
Hitchcock believed that people, in real life, didn’t really express their
deepest thoughts to the person they are talking to. And he took this
theory to his movie making. Watch his films and you can feel the
deception of the character by his eye movements.
Hitchcock never had the focus of the scene be on what the character
was saying but more on what he was doing. This gave away his true
feelings, if not to the other character in the room, to the audience.
In his own words.
"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 View Editing
The character in your movie can look at one person and smile and
then look at another person and give the same exact smile and yet
those two smiles had two completely different meanings.
Hitchcock was a master at this.
Point of view editing is, simply point, putting an idea in the mind of the
character without explaining it with the actual dialogue. His formula for
doing this is simple.
5. • 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 do this as many times as you want in order to build tension.
This is what Hitchcock refers to as “pure cinema”.
STEP 6: Montage Gives You Control
What this means is you divide the action of the movie into a series of
close-ups shown one after another. What you want to do is tie close-
ups together to tell a story.
For example, you might have a scene where one man shoots another.
The first close up is the look on the man’s face who is shot. The next
could be his hand clutching his chest. The next could be his knees
buckling…and so on.
Hitchcock was the master at this.
Watch the shower scene from Psycho and you’ll see a perfect example
of this.
Hitchcock’s basic rule was simple. Any time something really important
was going to happen…show it with a close-up.
STEP 7: Keep the Story Simple!
Hitchcock believed that is your story was confusing or required the
audience to remember a lot of things, you’re not going to be creating a
suspenseful piece of cinema.
Hitchcock believed that simple, linear stories with simple plots were
best. Think about his movies. Most of the plots were extremely simple.
Hitchcock removed anything from the movie that made it more
complicated than it had to be.
6. STEP 8: Characters Must Break Cliché
Hitchcock believed that you should make your characters the opposite
of what the audience expected. In other words, the guy who you’d
expect to be evil, turn him into the hero. You want to keep the
audience guessing.
STEP 9: Use Humor to Add Tension
What Hitchcock did, if you watch really closely, is that he gave his
characters the most ironic things to have to deal with. In other words,
Hitchcock used Murphy’s Law in his movies.
If it could go wrong…make it go wrong.
He was the expert in doing this.
So think about ways to give your characters ironic things to have to
deal with.
Watch “The Birds”. There is plenty of irony and humor in that movie if
you look for it, especially the scene where Tipi is trying to steal the
money and the maid is in the next room. We’re almost hoping she gets
away with it.
STEP 10: Two Things Happening at Once
Another thing that Hitchcock did was have two things going on in a
scene at the same time. Usually, these two things would have almost
nothing in common but yet would still tie into the story.
Hitchcock would alternate between the two events in the scene mixing
it up and keeping the audience wondering what was going to happen
next or how these two events would eventually tie together.
An example of this would be in the movie “Man Who Knew Too Much”
from 1956. In one scene, James Stewart and Doris Day were having
an intense phone call and in the middle of the scene we see guests
arriving which served as a dramatic counterpoint to the main focus of
the scene.
Again, Hitchcock was a master at this.
7. STEP 11: Suspense is Information
Hitchcock thought it was crucial to a scene to show the audience
something that the characters didn’t see. This his how you build
suspense by giving the audience this info.
An example of this is in the movie Family Plot from 1976. In one
scene, we see brake fluid leaking out of the car long before the
characters in the car knew what was happening.
In his own words…
“The essential fact is to get real suspense you must let the audience
have information."
Hitchcock nailed this in spades.
STEP 12: Surprise and Twist
This may be the hardest thing to do of all his tactics but it is critical if
you’re going to have a truly successful flim. You want the audience to
totally be surprised by how the movie turns out. You want twists and
turns. You never want to let them get comfortable thinking that they
know how it will end.
A perfect example of this is in the movie Saboteur. In the final scene,
Normal Lloyd is trapped at the top of the Statue of Liberty by Robert
Cummings who is holding a gun on Lloyd.
Just as we think that Cummings is going to shoot Lloyd, instead, he
speaks, Lloyd gets startled and falls off the statue.
This took everybody by surprise.
Nobody could do this like the master.
STEP 13: Warning: May Cause MacGuffin
Hitchcock had this down to a science.
If you look up the word MacGuffin in the dictionary, you will find the
following definition.
8. A plot element or other device used to catch the audience's attention
and maintain suspense, but whose exact nature has fairly little
influence over the storyline
The best way to explain what a MacGuffin is, is with an example.
A man is trapped in a bedroom being held at gunpoint by another
man. Somehow, he manages to make it out of the room and to the top
of the stairs only to find that at the bottom of the stairs is a wolf
blocking his way.
We really don’t care about the wolf and it has absolutely nothing to do
with the main story except that it is a device to keep the one man
from escaping from the other man.
Think about how many movies have used devices like this and how
many of them were Hitchcock movies.
You might be saying to yourself, a lot of movies today use this stuff.
Who do you think these guys learned it from?
Hitchcock…he’s the master.
9. Some Final Words
Naturally, the film makers mentioned in this report are the best of the
best. But they didn’t get there overnight. Nobody, not even Hitchcock,
was born with these smarts. They had to develop them just like
everybody else.
Below, you will find a great resource that, while it might not make you
the next Hitchcock overnight, will certainly give you the kind of
foundation you need to develop into a truly great film maker someday.
Here is the site so you can check it out.
NO BUDGET FILM MAKING
Making films is one of the most enjoyable things you can do with your
life. With the right training, some elbow grease and a little inspiration,
you could be the next Spielberg, Tarantino, or even Hitchcock.
Hey…anything is possible if you believe.
To YOUR Success,
Kirby Dillard
Movietraining.net