Once again we aren’t talking about colourizing every film (and even if we were so what don’t buy the colorized version no one is destroying the original and replacing it) Just the popular cheapie flicks (Serials Shorts, B movies)
You don’t watch too many cheapie shorts do you? Even today’s cheap films colour isn’t always used to its full advantage, except if they try not to clash.
Rushed films never went to any extrodinary artistic means to make sure they fully used their medium. They camera men had a set of simple rules to go by to make sure the picture was bearable.
ie No over exposure, or under exposer, put lighter objects in front of darker ones or vice versa. Never place like shades over each other and make sure everything is well lit and in focus.
That was about it.
Some companies were churning out several half hour shorts a month with overlap of crew and facilities. They didn’t spend much time worrying about artistic composition. They wanted to crank out as many shots as possible in the shortest time with the least amount of used film.
Even the full length features and serials were pretty much dashed out the same. Use this set move to the next while another crew redresses the same set to shoot the next flick.
I’d say the majority of all films ever made are of this ilk rather than masterpieces.
I knew this would be raised, but I didn’t have the energy to address it preemptively.
As evidenced by the kid whose dad wanted to indulge her with the colorized IaWL, given the choice too many people would opt to skip the education. I say if you want to see a color movie, see a color movie; don’t piss color all over a BW movie just because you’re stupid.
The report of the colorized Casablanca selling 600 copies nationwide would seem to disagree. The B&W version has sold more than ten times that.
There was a lot of chicken little sky-falling when the first colorized movies came out in the '80s — that the B&W originals would no longer be shown on television, and that the video stores would only carry the colorized versions. It didn’t happen.
My guess is that there is a self-selected group who choose to watch old movies, and that they are already predisposed to accept B&W. The subset of that group who will watch old movies only if they are in color or colorized is too small to make any affective change in marketing to old movie fans.
To add to what I said above, actually, I think its:
-Colorizing PD movies is really cheap to do.
-They Can - they can do what they like to the movie without any fear of interference or reprisal from the artists or their estates.
I’m sure it can be done competently (at least as competently as anything we’ve seen) on a moderately powerful desktop computing platform. You can get quite sophisticated colorizing software like this for not very much money at all (OK, using that one to colorize a whole movie would be quite painstaking, as it only works on static images - but it could still be done).
I expect a little more cash would buy a package capable of using colorizing overlays with motion paths.
Believe it or not, there’s a website that does this to brief clips from TV shows. I suppose one shouldn’t be surprised to find just about anything on the net.
