How to do a Hitchcock effect

[Chris Poisson]

Najor,

This shouldn’t be that hard to shoot, just backlight the subject against a white wall, and clean up the image by hand and with levels controls. If you shoot greenscreen you can use one or a combination of the mattes from keying for your image.

To answer your question, I have never seen a “silhouette” plugin anywhere, I suppose you could use one of the find edges and/or cortooner plugs in AE, for FCP I’m not sure. In any case if it were me, I’d shoot it.

Funny, you must be an aging boomer like me to remember that effect, quite distinctive in it’s time…

[Jerry Hofmann]

I think you could just backlight the person, and shoot that in front of a green screen. Doesn’t have to be fancy much either…. the green screen doesn’t even have to fill the frame except on the side the person walks into frame. Use Motion for the key and garbage matte…Then lower the levels so it really becomes a silhouette, key that over a drawing done in photoshop or other drawing program after you shoot it so it’s perfect… really don’t think this would be too hard to do at all.

Jerry

[Bob Cole]

Wasn’t it just a shadow from a nice focussed fresnel?

[Jeff Heck]

Yeah, I’m getting up there. I’m towards the end of the boomer rage.

Thanks for the input. I think I figured it out by using green screen by experimenting on a prior project. Thanks.

[Jeff Heck]

Thanks for the advice. I had an old green screen shoot and messed around with it. Using Chroma Key filter, I took the center on dial and turned it until the person was black and my background stayed green. All I need to do is render, add the blacked out version to the timeline along with the original version and then dissolve, with the time code matching.

My forte is writing and producing. Effects are, well, something I don’t use a whole lot of. Mostly story telling.

Thanks for the advice, it helped.

[Chris Poisson]

Bob,

Don’t know if you’re in the 50+ set, but this image was so strong it is clear as a bell in my mind. I would swear it was shot backlit, OR maybe a shadow cast on a scrim. In any event, I remember even now how I wished that the transition from the silhouette to the graphic Hitchock head logo had been a better match. So my 10 year old brain was thinking about transitions and didn’t even know what they were!

[Bob Cole]

[Chris Poisson] “I would swear it was shot backlit, OR maybe a shadow cast on a scrim.”

Take a look at this page(scroll down to the image)

https://hitchcock.tv/HFAQ/FAQ.html

What do you think?

I’ll bet that if we saw it again, we’d be amazed at how primitive it was. But that was part of the charm.

[Tom Matthies]

I’d guess that it was a backlit scene with Hitchcock behind a piece of Tough Frost, or frosted glass (or whatever they used back then) and the light, from behind casting a shadow on the frost. From what I remember I’d also say that the signiture artwork/outline was also on that piece of frost. Hitch walked in and stopped at just the right time to match up with the artwork. Things were pretty simple back then.
Yea, another aging boomer here as well. It’s bad when I remember watching the TV show…and it WASN’T a re-run.
Tom

[Chris Poisson]

Hey Bob,

Wow, you could be right on this, I guess it’s a much sharper image in my old memory, intriguing!

[Jerry Hofmann]

Join the club guys… Baby boomers are apparently making up 46% of the Mac market… I posted a rant in the MacWorld discussions over the fact that the article about this went on to say that it was a “concern” for Apple’s “hip” image. CRIPES!!!!!!!! the Baby Boomers INVENTED HIP!!!!!!!

Jerry