Колоризация черно-белых фильмов: история и технологии

Practice of adding color to monochrome motion pictures
colorization of monochrome moving picture images

Film colorization (American English; or colourisation [British English], or colourization [Canadian English and Oxford English]) is any process that adds color to black and white, sepia, or other monochrome moving picture images. It may be done as a special effect, to "modernize" black and white films, or to restore color segregation. The first examples date from the early 20th century, but colorization has become common with the advent of digital image processing.

The first film colorization methods were hand done by individuals. For example, at least 4% of George Méliès' output, including some prints of A Trip to the Moon from 1902 and other major films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies, The Impossible Voyage, and The Barber of Seville were individually hand colored by Elisabeth Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris. Thuillier, a former colorist of glass and celluloid products, directed a studio of two hundred people painting directly on film stock with brushes, in the colors she chose and specified; each worker was assigned a different color in assembly line style, with more than twenty separate colors often used for a single film. Thuillier's lab produced about sixty hand colored copies of A Trip to the Moon, but only one copy is known to still exist today. The first full length feature film made by a hand colored process was The Miracle of 1912. The process was always done by hand, sometimes using a stencil cut from a second print of the film, such as the Pathécolor process. As late as the 1920s, hand coloring processes were used for individual shots in Greed (1924) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) (both utilizing the Handschiegl color process); and rarely, an entire feature length movie such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1925) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1926). These colorization methods were employed until effective color film processes were developed. Around 1968 1972, black and white Betty Boop, Krazy Kat and Looney Tunes cartoons and among others were redistributed in color. Supervised by Fred Ladd, color was added by tracing the original black and white frames onto new animation cels, and then adding color to the new cels in South Korea. To cut time and expense, Ladd's process skipped every other frame, cutting the frame rate in half; this technique considerably degraded the quality and timing of the original animation, to the extent that some animation was not carried over or mistakenly altered. The most recent redrawn colorized black and white cartoons are the Fleischer Studios/Famous Studios' Popeye cartoons, the Harman Ising Merrie Melodies, and MGM's The Captain and the Kids cartoons, which were colorized in 1987 for airing on the Turner networks. With computer technology, studios were able to add color to black and white films by digitally tinting single objects in each frame of the film until it was fully colorized (the first authorized computer colorizations of B&W cartoons were commissioned by Warner Bros. in 1990). The initial process was invented by Canadian Wilson Markle and was first used in 1970 to add color to monochrome footage of the moon from the Apollo program missions.

The earliest form of colorization introduced limited color into a black and white film using dyes, as a visual effect. The earliest Edison films, most notably the Annabelle Serpentine Dance series, were also the earliest examples of colorization, done by painting aniline dyes onto the emulsion. Around 1905, Pathé introduced Pathéchrome, a stencil process that required cutting one or more stencils for each film frame with the aid of a reducing pantograph. In 1916, the Handschiegl Color Process was invented for Cecil B. DeMille's film Joan the Woman (1917). Another early example of the Handschiegl process can be found in Phantom of the Opera (1925), in which Lon Chaney's character can be seen wearing a bright red cape while the rest of the scene remained monochrome. The scene was toned sepia, and then the cape was painted red, either by stencil or by matrix. Then, a sulfur solution was applied to everything but the dyed parts, turning the sepia into blue tone. The process was named after its inventor, Max Handschiegl. This effect, as well as a missing color sequence, were recreated in 1996 for a Photoplay Productions restoration by computer colorization (see below). Partial colorization has also been utilized on footage shot in color to enhance commercials and broadcast television to further facilitate the director's artistic vision. As an example, Cerulean Fx provided partial colorization for Dave Matthews Band's music video The Space Between as well as Outkast's music videos Bombs Over Baghdad and Roses.

A number of British television shows which were made in color in the early 1970s were wiped for economic reasons, but in some cases black and white telerecordings were made for export to countries that did not yet have color television. An example is the BBC's five part Doctor Who story The Dæmons. Only one episode survived in color; the rest existed only as black and white film recordings. The only known color recording was a poor quality over the air recording of an abridged broadcast in the United States. In the 1990s, the BBC colorized the black and white copies by adding the color signal from the over the air recordings. The result was judged a success by both technicians and fans. In March 2008, it was announced that new technology, which involves detecting color artifacts ("dot crawl") in high resolution scans of black and white films, will be used to restore other Doctor Who episodes as well as shows like Steptoe and Son where some episodes originally produced in color only exist in black and white. However, there are no plans to use colorization on BBC programmes originally produced in black and white, such as the 1960s Doctor Who episodes since they have no color information available and so cannot be recovered using these methods.

Colorization is also sometimes used on historical stock footage in color movies. For instance, the film Thirteen Days (2000) uses colorized news footage from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The full color feature film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), which already made heavy use of digitally generated sets and objects, integrated black and white 1940s footage of Sir Laurence Olivier into scenes by colorizing him. In his feature film The Aviator (2005), Martin Scorsese seamlessly blended colorized stock footage of the Hell's Angels movie premiere with footage of the premiere's reenactment. The colorization by Legend Films was designed to look like normal three strip film but was then color corrected to match the two strip look of the premiere's reenactment. Also in The Aviator, Scorsese used colorized footage of Jane Russell from the original black and white film, The Outlaw and dog fight scenes from Hell's Angels.