The Farmer's Wife (1928) by Alfred Hitchcock
One of the most famous films created by Hitchcock, The Farmer's Wife, intertitles were obviously a crucial part of the film for it allowed dialogue to be exchanged between the characters and for the audience to then read what they were saying. So they were pretty important at informing the audience of the narrative. In this Hitchcock film, the distributors would have 'stretch-printed' each frame of each title every time a print was made and released. This involved repeating the same, individual frame several times to ensure the titles would appear on screen for an appropriate amount of time.
 |
| Intertitle from The Farmer's Wife |
At the BFI, they set to working on the restoration of the film, including the titles which was an extremely delicate procedure. The BFI had paired aims to re-integrate tighter and cleaner intertitles into the right length and with a fairly well-presented graphic quality. The issue with this was that it wasn't possible for the comapny to re-insert edited frames of each title (having been edited in programmes such as Photoshop) into a digital restoration master. The problem with this is that the titles would be left frozen, thus damaging the continuity and rhythm already established through the edits in the original film. In order to manage and move on from the problem, the BFI had to clean each frame in Photoshop and then record it back into the film.
No comments:
Post a Comment