What You Need to Know–Use of Birds (Real and Fake), Sound, Special Effects
Birds in the film
Rod Taylor revealed that the seagulls were fed a concoction of wheat and whiskey in order to compel them to stand still in the frame.
According to Hitchcock, roughly 3200 birds were used during shooting.
Ray Berwick was in charge of the live birds, training and catching many of them himself. Some of the “crows” were actually ravens. The gulls were caught in the San Francisco garbage dump and the sparrows were caught by John “Bud” Cardos.
However, the captured sparrows had to be used alongside birds from pet shops to achieve full effect in the scene where they invade the house.
Soundtrack
Many of the sound effects were created on the Mixtur-Trautonium, an electronic musical instrument developed by Oskar Sala.
Hitchcock decided against any conventional incidental score. Instead, he made use of sound effects and sparse source music in counterpoint to calculated silences.
He wanted used the electroacoustic Mixtur-Trautonium to create the bird calls and noises. He first encountered this predecessor to the synthesizer on Berlin radio in the late 1920s. It was invented by Friedrich Trautwein, and further developed by Oskar Sala into the Trautonium, which would create some of the bird sounds in this film.
The director commissioned Sala and Remi Gassmann to design electronic soundtrack. They are credited with “electronic sound production and composition,” and Hitchcock’s previous musical collaborator, Bernard Herrmann, is credited as “sound consultant.”
Source music includes the first of Claude Debussy’s Deux arabesques, which Tippi Hedren’s character plays on piano,
“Nickety Nackety Now Now Now,” by folk musician Chubby Parker is sung by the schoolchildren.
Special Effects
Once the crows attack and attic scenes were assembled by editor George Tomasini, they were sent to the special effects department for enhancement.
The special effects shots of attacking birds were completed at Disney Studios by animator/technician Ub Iwerks, who used the sodium vapor process (“yellow screen”), which he had helped to develop.
The SV process films the subject against a screen lit with narrow-spectrum sodium vapor lights. SVP shoots two separate elements of the footage simultaneously using a beam-splitter. One reel is regular film stock and the other a film stock with emulsion sensitive only to the sodium vapor wavelength.
This results in very precise matte shots compared to blue screen special effects, necessary due to “fringing” of the image from the birds’ rapid wing flapping.
At Disney, Iwerks worked on the following scenes: the children’s party, Melanie driving to Bodega Bay, and the first two cuts of the crow attack sequence. One challenge facing Iwerks was the scene where a number of sparrows fly in through the chimney of the family home. Utilizing an optical printer, his superposition of a group of small birds flying inside an enclosed glass booth made it possible to multiply the birds in the living room.
At MGM, Bob Hoag was put in charge of the optical effects for the sequence where Melanie hides inside phone booth as it is attacked by the birds.
Hitchcock requested that Hoag remove any shot where Melanie looked placid and urged her to be in constant movement instead.
Hoag, along with a team of 30, worked together on the blue backing and sodium matte shots. Linwood Dunn, a founder of Film Effects of Hollywood, was commissioned to work on the attic scene.
Bill Abbott, at Fox, was in charge of the optical effects for the crow attack sequence, which would take 6 weeks. Abbott organized two teams—both working 11 hours a day—to work on the sequence simultaneously. Abbott’s biggest challenge was size ratio–he had to ensure that the birds looked like they were attacking the children. He placed the birds within frame and zooming in on them to make them the correct size in proportion to the children.
At Universal, associate editor Ross Hoffman and matte artist Albert Whitlock worked on designing the town’s backdrop, including the birds in the trees and the scenery for the river shots of Melanie’s car arriving in Bodega Bay.
Great Scene: No Sound
Melanie sits down for a smoke on a bench outside the school. Unbeknownst to her, birds start to land on a frame behind her. One bird lands and hops from bar to bar. Next, there’s four, five, and eventually there is a legion.
In some scenes Hitchcock used real footage of birds, while in others, he used trained birds and papier-maché crows.
The scene is made unnerving by the absence of music. Bernard Herrmann served as sound consultant, but there is no orchestral score; instead, it’s accompanied by the juxtaposition of children singing inside the school.
