"Self-plagiarism is style"

The Colours of North by Northwest

30th January 2007

The Colours of North by Northwest

posted in Hitchcock DVD site, misc |

Colours, and the moods they evoke, play an important role in Hitchcock's films.

With that in mind, I got ImageMagick to figure out the average colour of each of the 1000 frames for "North by Northwest" — you can see the results here.

To put the average colours into context, here they are annotated with a selection of scenes…

nbnwcolours1

Getting the average colour of a given image got me wondering if it might be possible to do the same with the book cover scans on the OPAC. You could then virtually arrange and group books by their cover colours, in the same way that Huddersfield Public Library physically did last year:


(image courtesy of Iman's photostream)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Hitchcock DVD site, misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 3 responses to “The Colours of North by Northwest”

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  1. 1 On January 31st, 2007, Iman said:

    thats a wonderful experiment Dave. reminded me of this work by Brendan Dawes.

    http://www.brendandawes.com/sketches/redux/project.html

    - - -

    one of the things the huddersfield uni librarians told me when I was interviewing them was that on occasion a student will come up to them, obviously desperate to find a particular book they once saw and theyd ask things like 'im after a book i saw last year on this floor that has a really bright green cover, can you please help me!!'

    Search by colour here we come! :-D

    posted on January 31st, 2007 at 4:47 am

  2. 2 On January 31st, 2007, Jonathan Rochkind said:

    Yeah, it's occurred to me before that automatically getting the average color from a book image could be an easy way to the 'holy grail' (just kidding, but it is something often talked about) of providing access by cover of book.

    Of course, the book image you have doesn't always _really_ match the cover on the actual item you've got. But still, it would be neat. Somebody should try that.

    posted on January 31st, 2007 at 5:39 pm

  3. 3 On January 31st, 2007, Searching for books by the colour of the cover » "Self-plagiarism is style" said:

    [...] and Jonathan's comments on my previous post got me wondering how accurate searching by the average colour of a book cover would actually [...]

    posted on January 31st, 2007 at 9:48 pm

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