Timeline of Historic Film Colors
The goal of this project is to bring together a developed history of tech, social practice, and aesthetic practice. Additionally, it is to get an overview of many film digitization processes and set up standards. The audience this was crafted for includes film historians, archivists, curators, film scholars and students. In the project analysis “A Digital Humanities Approach to Film Colors” by creator Barbara Flueckiger, she writes, “The platform consists of a comprehensive web resource and online database for all topics related to film colors, with a special focus on their technology, aesthetics, analysis, and restoration. Thus the Timeline is a collection, an archive, a documentation process, and, increasingly, an annotated system for the investigation of the topic, which offers access to a curated body of information to researchers, archivists, film historians, and a broader audience of users from different backgrounds. Four different interdisciplinary approaches investigate the relationship between aesthetics and technical innovation as applied to film colors.”
ERC Advanced Grant Film Colors
This project also had numerous goals to accomplish. They include developing a tool for crowdsourcing color analysis of large groups of film – VIAN – used for video annotation analyzing film. Additionally, ERC’s goals expand to studying the basis of films’ aesthetic appearance, the digitization and restoration of historical film colors, and finally to spread results.
Scan2Screen
This project aimed to provide well grounded framework for archives and film labs to select scanners according to needs with a special focus on capturing certain film stocks. In addition, it aims to capture the colors of historic films in a manner that will uphold sustainably in the future.
Color Mania book
The focus of this project was to examine the interweaving connection and focuses on color in photography today and film from the point of view of historic mentality and aesthetics.
Collaboration, experimentation and openness are the three core goals of digital humanities and while the database overall definitely achieves all three on its own, the aforementioned projects do the same. Collaboration is displayed through the involvement of multiple organizations and individuals interested in preserving how film is studied. Through the development and collection of resourceful data used to create the database, as well as the Film Colors research project, experimentation was displayed. Lastly, this overall project showed openness via the sharing of resources and collection of film prints.