The Hitchcock Experience - a Spatial Montage project

This paper describes an ongoing art project exploring the generalization of classical montage theory to the emerging technology of “room scale VR”. We take the emblematic “crop duster” scene in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest and invite the spectator to experience it “from the inside”. This raises interesting research issues. How to inhabit this cinematic story world? How can the traditional tools of cinematography and montage be used to direct the audience in this new kind of experience? How can the rhythm of the spectator's body be matched to the rhythm of George Tomasini’s (Hitchcock’s editor) fast pace editing? And what form can this montage take and for what aesthetic and dramaturgical effects? To answer these questions, we propose the experiment of a montage that adapts in real time to the displacements of the body and the gaze of the spectator, engaging a dialectic between narrative rhythm and bodily rhythm. We propose new algorithmic tools to transport the audience into the story as originally planned by Hitchcock while at the same time respecting the behaviors of the audience to guide the experience. In doing so, we seek to create a new form of relationship between the author of a narrative experience in virtual reality and the spectator who explores and activates the experience with his own body.