a picture is worth a thousand words

A Hitchcock of 270 Megapixels

I was doing a little research about Alfred Hitchcock when I found this website, the Alfred Hitchcock Wiki. They have 1.000 frames of each Hitchcock’s movie, cool!. So why don’t use all these frames to generate a big… better HUGE Hitchcock portrait.

I took the frames from his ten best movies (of course, my personal best ten list), cleaned and cropped them so don’t have any black or white borders. Then, in order to sort them by bright, I did a little application that calculates the average intensity of each one and give me the list from the brighter to the darker.

The movie list: The 39 Steps (1935), Rebecca (1940), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Notorious (1946), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) and finally The Birds (1963).

Then I spread these 10.000 frames over a portrait of Alfred Hitchcock. But In my first tryouts I noticed that frames become too much little. It was a pity, so I decided to make a really BIG illustration.

It was really hard because I broke all the limits of my software, the only way to generate such a big file was by splitting the render in different parts. But you know, Hitchcock deserves it!.

And here you have my final illustration. A 270 megapixels image (14310x19805pixels). Please be careful, this image could kill your browser if you try to look at it directly. You better right click and “save as” to your hard disk and look trough a good image viewer.

Download JO-D-110405-Hitchcock.jpg (31MB)

Do you want to play?. Did you know that Hitchcock loved to appears in his movies as a figurant. Are you able to find him in some of these frames?.

3 Responses to “A Hitchcock of 270 Megapixels”

  1. Paul Rohde says:

    I’m sure you’ve been asked this before, but the software you use or created to do this is awesome, I would love to be able to take a look and use it or play with it. If not I completely understand. Keep up the awesome pieces of art!

    • juanosborne says:

      Hi Paul,

      At this moment I’m not thinking in make my tools free or open source. I spent a lot of time working on it as a professional tool for myself. Also, most of them are not really a ‘normal’ program, they don’t have a proper shell and looks more like pure code.

      Thank you very much!

  2. Maik says:

    I just wanted to let you know that someone is selling your work on ebay … (most of his canvas prints are infringing copyright and I’m pretty sure this is the case here as well)
    http://www.ebay.ca/itm/ALFRED-HITCHCOCK-MODERN-CANVAS-PRINT-ART-MANY-SIZES-FREE-UK-POSTAGE-/400400597317?pt=UK_Art_CanvasGiclee_RL&var&hash=item5d39bc4145&_uhb=1

    great work by the way!