COLOUR SPECIAL
GELATO VFX COLOURISATION
BEFORE
AFTER
CUT & COLOUR
Colourisation and restoration are Gelato VFX’s bread and butter. Its recent work on a Sky History docuseries brings unseen WWII footage to the fore. Katie Kasperson learns more
O ne of only a handful of VFX handles its fair share of archival film strips. The UK-based studio was tapped to colourise previously unseen footage for Sky History’s World War II with Tom Hanks , a 20-part docuseries that recounts “the entire breadth of the war from start to finish,” says Eddy Strickland, Gelato’s VFX supervisor. Gelato’s small team hand-colourised about 700 stills – a process that began with an intensive investigation into what WWII actually looked like. “All our colourisation work is backed up by historical research; we aim to be accurate in everything we do,” explains Strickland. “We find all the people in the images, find the right medals for them, that kind of thing. It’s a big undertaking.” Once every single on-screen subject is companies specialising in photorealistic colourisation and image restoration, Gelato
accounted for, each is then colourised and matched across every frame. This was far from its first foray into WWII history; last year, Gelato VFX earned a Royal Television Society Craft & Design Award nomination in picture enhancement for Liberation: D-Day to Berlin . “We’ve done a lot of war-related work in the past,” adds Strickland, “and there are some favourite shots which directors have put in shows – or maybe they are the only version of that event taking place. Some iconic shots you see repeated across documentaries. In this one, we managed to see a lot of images that we’ve never seen before – things that would normally get glossed over.” Gelato sends any physical celluloid footage to trusted partners who then digitise it. When it’s time to colourise, Strickland and his team employ their own tool, which they have developed in-house. “There isn’t a huge amount of
off-the-shelf software,” he admits, as photorealistic colourisation is a niche market. “We tend to home-grow a lot of it, which is great because you can make it do whatever you want.” For World War II with Tom Hanks, they employed their Gelato Reference Browser. With this recently introduced tool, artists lay any new imagery onto ‘an infinite canvas document’ that’s full of existing colour images. Artists can use this library to explore and ‘match any items, objects or people’ to a reference photo and ‘export potentially thousands of colour samples to later use in the painting process’, which is done digitally in Adobe Photoshop, says Strickland. “It's essential to have as many real colour references as we can – the more we have, the closer we can get to reality.” World War II with Tom Hanks airs on Sky History in the UK. Find out more about Gelato VFX at gelato-vfx.com
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