Why colorize black and white films?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It is generally accepted that sugar used to be sweeter, the grass was greener, and the girls were prettier. Also, many fondly remember how they watched black and white movies with their family and got great pleasure from it. "Beware of the Car", "17 Moments of Spring", "Only Old Men Go to Battle", "Height" … All these films were black and white, but everyone loved them. Now you can often stumble upon films of those times, but for some reason they became colored. There is a simple explanation for this - they were painted.

This process is more complicated than it seems, but people continue to do it. Although sometimes it seems to me that they are doing it in vain. So all the charm of the genre is lost. It's like digitizing phonograph records. You can argue or agree with what has been said, but let's just discuss the ways in which films are painted for now.

When they started making color films

You may be surprised, but color films have been made since the dawn of cinematography. Exactly to do, not to shoot. At that time, there was no question of color films, so they had to paint the frames with their hands and people did it. It was difficult and time-consuming to process the entire film, so the creators painted only parts of it for greater expressiveness. For example, pistol shots and the like. As a result, there was little sense in this, and they gradually stopped doing such work. But the fact itself does not allow us to say that before there was only black and white cinema.

In the USSR, colorization (as the process of working with color is called in cinematography) was brought by Sergei Eisenstein. He visited Paris and saw several ribbons of that time, which were painted. The coloring, however, was partial (elements of clothing, buildings, patterns). As a result, he caught fire with this idea and adopted this method of filmmaking.

The idea of frame-by-frame colorization of films quickly lost popularity, as it was very difficult. But many stubbornly continued to do this and even put scenes in the script in advance, which should be colored. It is interesting that in different countries they took different paths of “decorating films”. In the United States, they were engaged in coloring films for a long time, and in the USSR, this idea quickly cooled down and began to switch to the voice acting of ready-made tapes.

First color film

The first film that was shot in color was a tape created by photographer Edward Trainer. When making a film, the frames were sequentially captured on film through color filters - red, green and blue. For this, three different devices were used. Also, the picture was then reproduced through the same filters, recreating the original colors. He did it more than 110 years ago. True, it is difficult to call it a film, since these are just a few short sketches from life.

He was inspired by the work of a photographer friend who experimented with color photography and various filters.

Officially, the first color film is considered to be "Becky Sharp", released in 1935. It happened in the USA, and the directors were Ruben Mamulyan. In the USSR, the first color painting was "Nightingale-Solovushko" in 1936.

When they started painting films

Despite the one-off colorization of films, mass manual coloring became increasingly meaningless. Movies have gotten longer, films have become more complex, and reliability requirements are higher. Moreover, in the middle of the century, color films already appeared and people had enough of a show without watching old tapes.

There were still adherents of colorization, but they already wanted to automate the process. More and more often they thought about how to make the computer make old films in color, and in the 80s they finally came to that. Many of the ribbons we are used to seeing in color were originally black and white. For example, footage of NASA astronauts landing on the moon.

As now, many supporters and opponents of colorization immediately appeared. On both sides, there were enough influential people from the world of the film industry, and habits were the main reconciling argument. That is, if a person did not see how the movie looked before it became colored, he had no complaints. Everyone agreed with this.

The main technical point that people did not like was a very bad color transition. Especially on hair and other small items. This made the colored paintings look very unnatural.

How old films are colored

It's no secret that in order to colorize an old film, you need to know what color the objects in the frame were originally. For this, a long preparatory work is being carried out. The team of colorists travels to studios, examines the props, examines color photographs from the set and even interviews eyewitnesses of the process.

Before you understand what color the objects were in the frame, you need to find them in the warehouses of the props.

As a result, experts understand how this or that object should look, but it is not very logical to color each frame by hand, and a computer comes to the rescue. Whether it will still be when the quantum computers start working.

At the beginning, several key frames are taken (it is more correct to call them "color solution frames"). They have all the basic elements that need to be colored. It is clear that adjacent frames will differ little and they can be colored by analogy. This can already be entrusted to the computer.

First, the picture is digitized so that a computer can work with it. Usually old films are in very poor condition and work is underway to recover the material. Then several hundred key frames are taken and the process begins. For example, to color the film "17 Moments of Spring" one and a half thousand key frames were used, each of which was painted by hand.

After the keyframe coloring work is completed, everything is checked again. Participants of the events are again called for help and the color of props from the repositories of film studios is checked.

When everything is finally verified, the computer comes into play. It analyzes the grayscale and what colors have been manually assigned to them on keyframes. So pixel by pixel, it adjusts the color of each frame.

This process is very long and laborious. The problem is that even after all the manual work has been completed, it is not enough to simply press one button and get the result. Often the computer makes mistakes and it is necessary to make new adjustments and use additional keyframes. So the process is delayed for several months, and sometimes even more. At the same time, not one person is engaged in coloring, but an entire studio.

In our country there are two main studios that are engaged in such works - "Color Formula" and "Close-up". The main customer of colorization is usually Channel One.

How much does it cost to color a black and white film

As you understand, the process is very time consuming. Hence, it must be expensive. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find exact numbers, and they are not always advertised. However, the approximate figures range from a few hundred thousand dollars to a couple of million for an hour and a half film. The exact price depends on the duration, the quality of the work and how difficult it is to get the color source.

For obvious reasons, over time, the popularity of colorization of films decreases. Considering that almost all films from the gold collection have already been painted, few people would want to pay that kind of money. Especially against the background of how many new films are coming out.

Despite the cost and complexity, enthusiasts are still actively working on new tapes. Especially in our country, as we later began to color the films. They believe that this is the only way to instill a love of young people for the classics of cinema, in which there really are masterpieces that cannot be compared with any “Avengers”.

Considering how technology has stepped forward, now you can really do very high-quality coloring. For example, in the 80s of the last century, only 6 shades of gray were used for analysis, now there are 1,200 of them. The number of final colors has grown from 16 to 1,000,000. The numbers speak for themselves. For me, to be honest, the mystery is how 40 years ago they generally managed to carry out such work on a computer. Especially considering the power of that time.

There are several main difficulties in the coloring process. The first of these is face tints. 30-35 years ago, the colors of the faces were like those of corpses, but now they are, on the contrary, too ruddy. The middle ground was never found.

During the filming of black and white cinema, there was no such technology as it is now. As a result, the make-up was so-so, the sets were made of plywood, and the costumes often left much to be desired. It was just that in the frames of those years (with the quality of shooting) this was not visible. Now with processing it gets out and you have to additionally "clean up the marriage".

How people feel about coloring films

To be honest, I'm not very good at coloring films. It seems to me that some tapes are better left untouched. Many directors are of the same opinion. Those who are now alive are asked their opinion, but those who are no longer cannot be asked. Instead, rely on their original opinion. For example, many directors in the days when both color and black-and-white photography were possible deliberately chose the second option. They believed that the brain would think of much brighter colors than the operator would show them. Accordingly, scripts were written in this vein.

For example, there was a case when the daughter of the famous Leonid Bykov, who is no longer with us, went to court, claiming that the film "Only old men go to battle" was originally conceived as black and white.

The mass public also cannot decide on their attitude to coloring. True, most agree that only comedies should be painted. Dramatic pictures should retain their drama, most of which lies precisely in the color scheme and the ability of each person to decide for himself how he sees the scene.