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Hitchcock Chromatography

posted by Dave on the 08/Mar/2009 - 6 comments
categories: 1000 frames, Hitchcock DVD Wiki, fun

Here's 36,000 frames from all of the black & white Hitchcock films…

Burst of Hitchcock

The position of each frame on the circle is determined by two variables:

1) position in the film — frames from the start and end are near the top (12 o'clock) and the frames from halfway through are at the bottom (6 o'clock), etc.

2) the position on the axis — calculated from the average brightness of each frame, with darker frames near the centre, and brighter frames further out.

I've also done the same for individual films. I'm not sure if it's possible to guess the film, but it's interesting to see the differences between them all. They remind me of ink blots and paper chromatography experiments in science lessons :-)

Saboteur (1942) Champagne (1928) Notorious (1946) Stage Fright (1950) The Ring (1927) Murder! (1930)
Downhill (1927) The Farmers Wife (1928) The Skin Game (1931) Suspicion (1941) Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Number Seventeen (1932)
The Paradine Case (1947) I Confess (1953) Easy Virtue (1928) Strangers on a Train (1951) Foreign Correspondent (1940) Rich and Strange (1931)
Secret Agent (1936) Waltzes from Vienna (1934) Mr and Mrs Smith (1941) Jamaica Inn (1939) Spellbound (1945) The Pleasure Garden (1925)
The Manxman (1929) Lifeboat (1944) The Wrong Man (1956) Sabotage (1936) Juno and the Paycock (1930) The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
Rebecca (1940) Young and Innocent (1937) The Lady Vanishes (1938) Blackmail (1929) Psycho (1960) The 39 Steps (1935)



6 Responses to 'Hitchcock Chromatography'

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  1. luke kurtis said, on March 9th, 2009 at 9:55 pm

    I love these. What software do you use to generate them? I'd love to play around with it.

  2. Dave Pattern said, on March 10th, 2009 at 6:51 pm

    Hi Luke

    I used Perl and ImageMagick. For each frame, I resized it to 1×1 pixel to get the average brightness. I'm going to have a stab at doing something with the colour films this week.

  3. meneame.net said, on March 18th, 2009 at 9:17 pm

    Cromatografía de Hitchcock [ING]…

    Impresinante mosaico (7.200 x 7.200 pixels) compuesto por 36.000 imágenes de todas las películas en blanco y negro del director de cine Alfred Hitchcok, dispuestas en forma de círculo, y atendiendo a dos variables: la posición en la película y la …

  4. Daniel said, on July 21st, 2009 at 7:31 pm

    Very cool! I'd like to see these in color too.

  5. KULTURTECHNO » 36 000 Filmstills von Hitchcock said, on July 24th, 2009 at 7:07 am

    [...] (via) Written by Kreidler in: Museum für moderne Kunst | [...]

  6. Creatief met Hitchcock – the sequel said, on October 18th, 2009 at 9:48 pm

    [...] manier (gebaseerd op het moment in de film en de donkerte van de still). Het resultaat -  Hitchcock Chromatography – zijn fascinerende abstracte werkjes, helemaal als alle 36 films bij elkaar gevoegd worden. [...]

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