Alfred Hitchcock Presents... Bridge to Terabithia by Liv & Sydnye

For this project, Sydnye and I decided to transform the movie Bridge to Terabithia into an Alfred Hitchcock film. To do so, we added his iconic elements of suspense that he frequently uses in his films. In this class, we watched Psycho and Rear Window and so in both of those films we can see evidence of his use of long shots to show a full frame of information for the audience to take in. Specifically in Psycho, we see he uses a dolly zoom as Arbogast falls down the stairs, it makes the audience feel like he’ll never hit the bottom. Another tactic to add suspense Hitchcock uses is low lighting. In the super suspenseful scenes the lighting is often minimal and it usually shines from below to cast a shadow on someone’s face to make them look more devious. The final aspect that Hitchcock uses is close ups. When a character realizes something or they have a different facial expression, in order to create suspense the camera gets super close to them. This creates suspense by eliminating background factors other elements in the scene that distract from the character’s face but also it may be placed where information would be received by the audience leaving them somewhat in the dark.

When choosing our camera angles and lighting, we wanted to make sure that we accurately reflected the horror genre and style of Alfred Hitchcock. The most iconic scene that immediately came to mind was from “Psycho”, when Sam Loomis is stabbed and falls down the stairs. We knew this was accomplished through a dolly zoom and was a critical identifier. This dolly zoom is present in our first box of our storyboard, but with our twist of being at eye level. Our third box is a long shot with low key lighting, much like establishing shots in Psycho. We wanted to make sure the forest appeared ominous, and the best way was to introduce shadows and a feeling of unease. We chose to make the fourth box a close up to establish the feeling of Jesse, much like in Psycho when they zoom in on the unwavering face of Janet Leigh and it becomes apparent to the audience that something terrible has happened. Similar to our scene, Jesse and Leslie have stumbled upon a giant footprint are alone in the forest. We chose to do a split background in our seventh box because we wanted to make the audience aware of the current setting. Hitchcock does this in Psycho, when the ever ominous house is present on top of the hill. We wanted the river to be present, so you have that imagine in the back of your mind for future scenes and know it is somehow important. Our very last box depicts the camera being semi submerged within the stream. We depict air bubbles floating up from the bottom of the river, leaving the audience in suspense. It is similar to waiting for a bomb to go off, because they know something terrible has happened but they do not know what has caused these air bubbles.