In The Birds (1963), Alfred Hitchcock cuts to a view from high above the town, with the gulls dropping into it. He told Roger Ebert he built it in three layers: a parking lot with people hurrying across it, an artist's painted view of the town laid over that, and gulls filmed from a cliff with the camera pointed straight down as scraps were thrown off. Two women then spent three months working the gulls in, frame by frame.

Why so high? To show the beginning of the gulls' descent on the town, he told Francois Truffaut, and "you can do a lot of things very quickly by getting away from something." One account says he called it God's point of view.

Does a view from straight above make people look small? We found no study that tested it. The town, the fire, the gulls and the stand-ins here are our own models, built and lit in code.

So, whose eyes were you looking through?

Sources: Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967); Hitchcock to Roger Ebert (1969, as quoted by Cultured Arm); Moral, The Making of Hitchcock's The Birds (2013); TCM (Stafford, 2004); AFI Catalog.
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