Hitchcock review

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Verdict:

Hitchcock is an excellent sketchbook for storyboardists, as long as you don't object to the way it shares your ideas with your production team.

Review Date: 5 Nov 2009

Price when reviewed: from the App Store

Reviewed By: Alan Stonebridge

Our Rating 4 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

No matter the size of your movie-making ambition, you should have a proper storyboard before you begin shooting so that the aims are clear. Hitchcock lets you create one on your iPhone, but why do it there rather than on paper or on a Mac?

Your iPhone is with you most of the time, and its camera is ideal for snapping suitable locations, and those photos become panels to which you can add notes, scene and shot numbers. If you only have an iPod touch, now is the time to lament its lack of a camera. Audio samples can be captured, and they play when you review a timed storyboard with the Watch feature.

Things come to life in the panel editor, where you add camera directions (dolly, zoom, track and pan), place characters in the scene and add arrows to communicate motion. They're manipulated with buttons around the edges of the screen and intuitive multi-touch swipes, pinches and twists to move, scale and rotate objects.

Hitchcock isn't a full-blown storyboard editor by any means. Other than photos, there's no way to add artwork from another application as you would in a Mac application, and there's only a small range of elements you can add to a scene. Of most concern is that shared PDFs are uploaded to Cinemek's website without any password protection. Even if the address is unlikely to be guessed, we'd much rather Hitchcock attached it to an email, rather than sending a download link.

For more iPhone app review like this, check out Know Your Mobile.

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