1000 Dollar Film

If you want to really add some cinematic appeal to your movie without adding more money to your budget, look no further than twisted tale guru Alfred Hitchcock. There was a man who knew how to draw in an audience! Here are a few tips on adding some Hitchcockian style to your film.

Give your characters plenty of scene time. This might sound obvious, but instead of focusing on a dynamic film wrapped around a couple of characters, why not focus on the characters themselves? Give them dramatic, unique personalities with layered backgrounds and lives, and let them play out these extraordinary lives in lots of clever dialog and interaction.

Interact with your audience. While you certainly can’t create a quiz for them to fill out while they watch your movie (or can you? People voted for Shrek Idol, after all…), you can put yourself in the viewer’s shoes. What would cause your audience to scream, cry, get angry? It’s just as if you were writing a novel–if you cry, your audience will cry. Keep that in mind when you create your movie as an entire experience.

Keep them begging for more. Hold back key details as long as you can. Now, this can go both ways: don’t make your audience angry by not letting them know what the heck is going on. Instead, keep teasing them so they won’t figure the whole thing out until the end, a technique used in films like Mystic River and The Sixth Sense.

Provide variations in proximity. Alfred Hitchcock liked to use close-ups as well as pan out far away from his actors to create different feelings during a movie. Use these every time you want to either create a very emotional scene or a feeling of detachment.

Tags: alfred hitchcock, cheap movie making, directing movies, hitchcock films, hitchcock themes, making movies, movie twists, movie writing