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Post #882481

Author
Swazzy
Parent topic
The Spongebob Squarepants Movie - 35mm Re Creation (a WIP)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/882481/action/topic#882481
Date created
27-Nov-2015, 4:00 PM

Supmandude said:

I’m 99% sure they just put a filter on it for the trailer. I remember the trailers having the look present in your pictures, but the movie to my knowledge always looked how it does on the Blu-Ray.

See, that’s the conclusion I came to recently, going over the sources I have. Or at least, it would be, if not for the 35mm print of the trailer I own looking nothing like the scan on Paramount’s YouTube channel. Just to compare, here’s what this frame of the ‘morning routine’ sequence looks like in the YouTube trailer:

I took that frame, and in Photoshop I matched it near perfectly to the same frame on my own 35mm reel. After doing this, it was evident that Paramount’s upload had a glaring blue tint that made the frame murkier and more off-colored than it should be. Here’s what it looks like on an actual film reel, though:

Now, compare this to the Blu-ray:

Even after the correction, the colors are nothing alike. And this is from the final trailer, which was cut together only a few months before the film’s release.

Now I’m no expert on the subject (“in fact I’m not an expert on anything”), but if the digital render we have now on the blu-ray was transferred straight to film for the theatrical release, it would look much the same in color, but lacking in saturation, and duller/“dirtier” than it should appear. This is not the case.

Despite this, preview screens for one telesync from 2004 that I’ve seen prove that the blu-ray colors might not have been conceptualized only after the film’s theatrical run, and were present in some cases. So I theorize that, two separate color timings were created to accommodate for both 35mm screens and digital screens. Keep in mind, this is 2004 we’re talking about; digital theaters were very scarce and severely outnumbered, meaning a lot more people than not saw the 35mm version:

I can’t say for sure which grading came first, though; but if the goal here is to re-create what the film looked like on a 35mm print, I’d say there’s still an objective at hand. I’m fairly convinced it’s the version I saw in theaters in 2004, and the version I haven’t seen since.

Also, SBMania is a fantastic forum. I feel like I made an account there at some point, but in the mean time you could link this post, and see what they think.