As the title suggests this project will be my attempt to replicate the Technicolor aesthetic seen in the photos from the Senator Theatre Technicolor I.B. showing for the whole of the Original Trilogy. Now as Technicolor stopped making Imbibition prints by the time The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi were made, whatever this project produces for those two films will be at best examples of what could have been.
At present I am working on Star Wars as that is the film we have a source of reference for. Once Star Wars is complete I should then be able to use the same colour correction settings to re-color the other two films, tweaking the settings for Empire and Jedi as necessary.
Star Wars in Technicolor DVD Label
For this project I am using the G-Force enhancement script on the video from the NTSC DVDs of Star Wars & Empire, and the PAL DVD of Jedi, albeit without G-Forces levels, colour correction and subtitles commands, I have also modified the scripts to output at PAL resolution rather than NTSC, this was I can do both without loss of quality. 😄 For the Audio I have Belbucus’ theatrical audio for Star Wars and his '93 PCM captures for Empire and Jedi however these are kind of my plan B as I would ideally like to use dark_jedi’s captures of the theatrical audio for Empire and Jedi when they are released instead. For the alien subtitles I have recreated the theatrical subtitles (placement,size,timings) using myscamore’s avisynth script as a guide. Naturally I would like to thank G-Force, Belbucus, dark_jedi and myscamore for their contributions to this wonderful community.
For the colour correcting I am using Apple Color 1.5. I have played around with several different ways to get the GOUT to look like the Technicolor print but the one that seems to work best is to increase the GOUTs saturation then dial down the reds so neutral colours are no longer tinted, and then selectively correct individual colours for example even with these adjustments Obi-Wan’s cloak and undershirt are still rather washed-out and red, so isolating the HSL range of this washed-out reddish-brown I can selectively colour correct it to be a more greenish-brown as in the Technicolor print. Similarly I can isolate the HSL range of skin-tones and adjust them to avoid the “carrot people” look.
As I want to be able to copy these settings over to the other two films when I am done I am not correcting on a scene by scene basis but rather building up a colour grade that is applied to the whole film. That said there is one exception in Star Wars and that is the binary sunset scene, which I have colour corrected to more closely match what I understand to be its original colouring (Lighter, more reddish/orange than blue/purple.)
I think that covers all the basics of this project, if you have any questions I would like to hear them. 😃