North By North West

                                    

                                                   North by North West 1959

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Ernest Lehman
Main Stars: Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason

Storyline
It is film about an ordinary man called Roger Thornhill, who gets mistaken for a man called George Kaplan. Philip Vandamm who is a foreign spy and his henchman Leonard both try to get rid of Roger Thornhill and before Roger has time to make sense of the situation, he is framed for murder. 

Sub-genres
North by Northwest is a thriller but just like many other films, has more than one sub-genre attached to it.

The different sub-genres are: 

• Romance
• Crime Fiction
• Spy
• Adventure
• Action

"A thriller is a villain driven plot, whereby he presents obstacles the hero must overcome"
This is true in north by north west because Roger Thornhill had to overcome various different obstacles that Vandamm throws at him. Roger is a resourceful hero and uses his surroundings to his advantage.

Romance In the film, there is romance shown between Roger Thornhill and Eve Kendall. The women in the film are used as hostages, which has more of an effect on the hero if he has some sort of feelings for the woman, therefore the romance aspect was introduced.

Crime FictionCrime is a part of the film, due to the fact that the hero and the villain both use guns and other weapons. The choice of weapons informs the audience on what type of people the characters are, and that crime is a part of their lifestyle.

SpyIn the movie there are characters that are spies who plot against each other. This is why the film has spy as a sub genre.

AdventureThis film can be considered as an adventure thriller, due to the fact that all of the events in the film take place in different locations and the story progresses following the perspective of Roger Thornhill. 

ActionThis film consists of multiple scenes that contain action events, used to keep the audience entertained and help the story progress.

The crop duster scene

I will examine the crop duster scene from the film and focus on the use of the editing, mise-en-scene and the sound.

Sound - The sound throughout the entirety of the scene is very quiet and kept to minimum. This is because the silence is more effective than music, when the goal is to create tension and build up suspense, due to the audience being more vulnerable to the different suspense building techniques. Nearing the end of the scene background music can be heard which is non diagetic. The music is used to implement the action within the scene. 


Mise en scene -The setting of the scene is very important and it is crucial that it doesn't give away too much information about what may happen. This setting was chosen by Alfred Hitchcock because although it is quite unusual, for a secret meeting of two people to occur in a desert-like area. This makes it slightly harder for the audience to predict what will happen next, since it is taken out of the traditional way those scenes are filmed in thrillers ex.: in a dark alley at midnight. Which is also a perfect time to use red-herrings, which would confuse the audience even more making them more unaware of the direction the film will go next. The crop duster is a suitable prop to use as it sends us a message that the hero is at a disadvantage.

Editing -The editing in this scene starts slow, to show that there is no action happening. This helps to build up suspense and tension, while also creating an aura of mystery. This allows there to be more red-herrings because when something does suddenly happen, the audience will be driven away by a false clue. At the end of the scene there is a shot-reverse-shot of a truck coming towards Roger, the camera switches back and forth and zooms towards Rogers face, so that it looks as if the truck is coming straight at him. Towards the end the editing becomes faster and that helps to make the audience become more engaged with the action.

Camera Shots -The shots in the film are usually medium shots or long shots. The medium shots are used to show Roger, while the long shots are mostly of the crop duster to show the good and the bad. 

Sound Exercise Task 1

I was told to create a video to practice the use of sound techniques we have learnt in a film, so that when we record the final task it comes out the way we want it to. I believe that if we as a group focused more on filming techniques rather than the dialogue, then this would have looked better. We made a lot of mistakes regarding the cinematography and we ran out of time due to technical difficulties with the microphone. Afsana did not quite know how to use it properly and the first time we tried to record the encounter of two friends and the dialogue it came out well, however Afsana was not made aware by Sirhan that the microphone was not switched on during the recording. Since we had to repeat that whole scene it did not quite work out because we tried to do everything within the short time we had.

There was a part in the video at the end where me and Afsana were in the shot of Manjit walking down the stairs which was a technical mistake.

Preliminary Exercise Video and Evaluation

We were told to create a video using all the things we have learnt so far. We completed two other tasks presented to us in hope that we will learn how to effectively manipulate the sound and camera techniques. We were then told to evaluate those videos and figure out what were the mistakes that we made and how we can improve them or what precautions can we take so that our final piece is flawless.

For the other two videos the group I was in consisted of me, Jake, Afsana, Ryan, Manjit and Sirhan. However, I believe we did not work well as a group and the result would not have been as I envisioned it to be. Therefore me and Jake decided to work on the preliminary task by ourself as we have similar visions and work ethics which means the final result will be the way we both wanted it to be.

We spent a over an hour preparing the storyboard and discussing the different camera angles we can include, what would match the story well and preserve the ideas in our minds conveying our point across to the viewers. Once we settled on a short story line, we went out to film what we came up with and recorded each shot from more than one perspective so that when it comes to editing we have lots of material to choose from. Jake was the one doing the filming while I was in charge of the editing. During the editing we have talked about the different ways we could improve the way we organise everything in the final piece. As Jake was recording he made sure to keep the recording baggy, what I mean by this is that he started recording and waited a few seconds before telling me to start acting. This makes it easy to edit later as it ensures that none of the valuable material gets cut off during recording.