Vertigo The GooFilm

Please! Please! Please! Do NOT take this video out of context. It is an exercise for Fun! Fun! Fun! and Creativity. Quality is NOT a criteria. Take it for what it is and not what you would like it to be.

Thank you. Francis

The term, “a swede” was created by the character Jerry (Joe Black) in the movie, Be Kind, Rewind, describing a home-made movie produced with whatever is handy and cheap to tell an existing film’s plotline in less than a minute. The main goal is to have fun when you make it.

I had just watched the movie Vertigo When Hitchcock visited the San Francisco area, he liked it so much that he decided to make a movie using it as a backdrop. The first time I watched Vertigo, I remember thinking it was a documentary about San Francisco and the story was just an excuse to make the film.

What I had that was handy and cheap was my laptop, software and the internet to research, design and produce. It was easy, fast and fun. I used Google Earth and/or Google maps for different research. Google Earth allowed me to recreate the important scenery in the movie. The only important set I could not reproduce was the San Luis Bautista mission tower, which was created for the movie and which I then did myself, using a tool from this Google universe to recreate it in 3D.

After the storyboard was made with comparative shots form the Vertigo movie and Google Earth panoramas, I had to “cast” the characters. I realized I had a fedora (similar to the main character’s hat) and my wife had a classy hat with a “necklace” to represent the second main character. Once all my shots were edited, I animated the characters in Final Cut Pro.

This resulted in a very rough animation. As Hitchcock did in the movie, I used the characters and their story as an excuse to show the background from Google Earth. The overall feeling of Vertigo was a beautiful landscape haunted by two characters.

Enjoy!