Implementing Hitchcock - the Role of Focalization and Viewpoint

Abstract

Focalization and viewpoint are important aspects of narrative movie-making that need to be taken into account by cinematography and editing. In this paper, we argue that viewpoint can be determined from the first principles of focalization in the screenplay and adherence to a slightly modified version of Hitchcock's rule in cinematography and editing. With minor changes to previous work in automatic cinematography and editing, we show that this strategy makes it possible to easily control the viewpoint in the movie by rewriting and annotating the screenplay. We illustrate our claim with four versions of a moderately complex movie scene obtained by focalizing on its four main characters, with dramatically different camera choices.