#giovannafossati

[darinboville]

And if you become intrigued about the films and wish to see them for yourself the book offers an excellent index to each of the frames they have reproduced. #silentfilms #art #color #pathé #martinscorsese #tomgunning #joshuayumbie #giovannafossati #jonathonrosen #eyefilmmuseum

[darinboville]

Other times color would be used more allegorically, despite the realistic battle scene and the binocular vision mask. This is the tinting technique where the light tones are changed to the color, leaving the dark tones increasingly colorless. Both techniques could be used together, of course. #silentfilms #art #color #pathé #martinscorsese #tomgunning #joshuayumbie #giovannafossati #jonathonrosen #eyefilmmuseum

[darinboville]

Even without the multi-color hand painting technique, color could be used in powerful ways. Here is a toned image with the blacks turned blue for a ghostly night scene. Convert this image on your phone to regular black and white and see how much it loses without the color. #silentfilms #art #color #pathé #martinscorsese #tomgunning #joshuayumbie #giovannafossati #jonathonrosen #eyefilmmuseum

[darinboville]

Later, mechanical aids were invented to speed up the process of hand painting films. The stencil process worked by making cut outs of each frame, one for each color. They used a magnifying gizmo to make the cutting more accurate. Then you'd use the stencil to cover the frame and apply that color of dye, then go to the next frame and stencil. Obvious speed an accuracy improvements. #silentfilms #art #color #pathé #martinscorsese #tomgunning #joshuayumbie #giovannafossati #jonathonrosen #eyefilmmuseum

[darinboville]

There were three basic processes for getting color on film. Two were similar. In tinting you soaked the film in a dye which changed light tones to the color of the dye. The other using a chemical to do the reverse--it changed the darks leaving the highlights proportionally unchanged. But the third way was, essentially, hand coloring. It is what it sounds like. Hundreds of women bent over applying dye to individual frames (to be projected at sixteen of these frames per second). Like hand painting photographs they hand painted each frame. And since (of course) color film didn't exist they made each duplicate of the film by hand painting each in turn. A ten minute film would have 16 frames times sixty seconds times ten minutes of film. That's a lot of frames. #silentfilms #art #color #pathé #martinscorsese #tomgunning #joshuayumbie #giovannafossati #jonathonrosen #eyefilmmuseum