4th International Conference Colour in Film

During the first half of the twentieth century, besides multiple subtractive color film processes, several additive color techniques were developed for motion picture films. Kodak and Agfa implemented the principles of the lenticular screen process in 16 mm motion picture products (marketed as Kodacolor and Agfacolor respectively), which were used by amateur filmmakers mostly during the 1930s. In a lenticular film the plastic support is embossed with a vertical array of cylindrical lenses, and a black and white emulsion is applied on the other side. Images were captured adding a tripartite red-green-blue filter in front of the camera lens. During the exposure of the film, the colored filter in combination with the embossed lenticules created spatially-encoded color information, which was developed and fixed by reversal processing. In the original technique, the captured colors were displayed with a projector equipped with an equivalent red-green-blue filter. The resulting images were rather blurry, small and dim, so the movies could be only presented to a limited number of spectators.
Digital technologies provide new opportunities to screen these movies, including the possibility to present them to a larger audience. In the framework of the doLCE project at the Digital Humanities Lab - University of Basel, software was written to extract the encoded color from a high-resolution scan of the silver emulsion. The way the extracted information is translated into color and the rendition of the characteristic image structure can be accomplished following a variety of different approaches, which lead to very different visual results. The fundament laid by the doLCE project is now further elaborated at the University of Zurich under the auspices of the research project ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors.
In this presentation available options will be discussed and evaluated with the aim to define a clear and efficient digitization workflow to be offered to film archives.