COLOUR SPECIAL
Gelato VFX’s Eddy Strickland outlines the processes involved in adding historically accurate colours to vintage film footage WORDS KATIE KASPERSON
of medals and ribbons. We try to get as much of the real grit in as possible.” DOWN TO THE DETAILS When Strickland says ‘paint’, he means paint. “We don’t do automatic colourisation or anything like that. We have to manually paint everything. It’s a team of artists who do that and pick the correct colours, led by information from the history team.” (That said, Gelato also hosts a separate scan store, which sells high-res maps of everyday objects like fruits, bricks and fabrics.) For older footage, which is all monochrome, Strickland and his team create colour from scratch. For more recent footage, which is often already colourised, “we end up switching to restoration rather than colourisation,” he explains – fixing the original footage rather than changing it altogether. “It’s all challenges, all the way down,” Strickland admits, often handling film that’s ‘80 years old as a minimum’. “In VFX, we’re used to being handed stunning plates off a RED camera, where there’s all this data. It’s wonderful, it’s pristine, it’s perfect. It’s very much the opposite
A dding colour to monochrome only does it require painstaking attention to detail and refined artistic skill, but it also demands contextual awareness to ensure historical accuracy. While Gelato VFX is ‘a traditional VFX house’, according to Strickland, handling CGI and motion graphics, its speciality is colourisation and colour restoration. “Colourisation has been around more or less in the same form it’s always been since it started decades ago,” begins Strickland. “For flesh tones, everyone’s got the same skin. It’s flat and floats above the surface of the video,” he argues. At Gelato VFX, Strickland continues, “we wanted to avoid that. About eight years film is an endlessly challenging process – just ask Eddy Strickland, VFX supervisor at Gelato VFX. Not
ago, we started developing a pipeline for black & white image colourisation with a view of trying to go for something more photorealistic – that is, as close to the actual event as possible,” he explains. “We’re striving to do something that’s passable as original colour.” To ensure the colours are authentic, Strickland and his team work closely with historians and researchers “who create a reference bible for every shot,” he says. “It starts general, like what dyes and pigments would be available in the year the film was shot, and then specifics based on the project.” Perhaps as expected, Gelato handles a lot of war footage, which can date back to the late 1800s. “We spend a huge amount of time painting all of this work up. It’s the correct colours for uniforms, guns, as well as a lot
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