Thanks to a very diverse team consisting of film scholars, historians, a technician and restorer, a physicist with a special degree in material analysis of cultural heritage, the project’s aim to connect the various, hitherto separated domains in film colors research can be fully implemented. The following steps were executed or are in progress:
Seminars with students and phd-candidates from the University of Zurich: In collaboration with PostDoc Researcher Dr. Bregt Lameris, the PI organized three comprehensive and intensive seminars and about 20 workshops with external experts from universities and archives in Europe and the United States.
Analysis of a group of at least 400 films: For the computer assisted analysis the team devised a workflow consisting of a video annotation system with the software ELAN and a custom-built offline database in FileMaker (analysis database). The analysis database is connected to an online database for the complete group of films (corpus database) that allows to define relations and to import data directly from the corpus database. Each film is segmented in sequences with consistent color schemes and then analyzed according to the protocol defined in the analysis database. In addition, there is a keyword database and a glossary database, the latter elaborated by the students to support consistency across the analyses. Six analysis work stations with calibrated 4K monitors are installed at the University of Zurich to allow six persons to work simultaneously on the analyses (fig. 1). To date, 376 films of the planned corpus of 400 films have been analyzed and evaluated.
Development and application of a computer-assisted tool with a web interface for crowdsourcing of film color analyses: Based on the computer-assisted method for the analysis of films, the PI initiated a collaboration with the Visualization and MultiMedia Lab at the University of Zurich to support the development of the tools for the (semi-)automatic analysis of film colors. At the core is a platform called VIAN that enables semi-automatic segmentation, visual and verbal video annotation, a screenshot manager, the implementation of all the databases and data developed in the project, and the automatic tools for the analysis of the film colors’ aesthetics (fig. 2).
Study of film color technology in combination with chemico-physical analyses of historical color films to understand their influence on films’ aesthetic appearance: Dr. Trumpy has established a multispectral imaging workflow that enables the measurement of spectral absorbance distribution of dyes and color compounds in historical color films, regardless of their composition (fig. 3).
Digitization and restoration of historical films: Complete digitization and restoration equipment and a workflow have been installed. These consist of a professional scanner specifically developed for sensitive and brittle archival film, plus a color grading workstation and one for image stabilization, optical restoration and retouching. More than 30 restoration case studies have been undertaken in the course of the project, 14 of which are completed, while the other ones are underway in different stages (see
fig. 4 + 5(opens in new window).
Exemplary studies of three periods in the development of film colors: The emergence of film colors from early applied colors to so-called “natural” colors 1896–1930; development of standards in film color technology and aesthetics 1930–1955; the dominance of chromogenic processes 1955–1995. Three PhD students have been working on the three periods and applied the method presented in section Aim 1. In March 2018, all of them presented their results at the third international Color in Film conference in London (see:
http://www.research-projects.uzh.ch/p21207.htm(opens in new window)).
