Colouring a bygone era

TECHNO BEAT

In a bid to resurrect the charm of old classics, Bollywood producers are adding colour to the black and white starrers.

In 2004, they 'colourised' the grand Mughal-e-Azam. Now, films like Naya Daur, Chaudaveen ka Chand, Kagaaz ke Phool and Hum Dono will be colourised, and more will follow.

Experts expect the 'colourisation' market to touch Rs 100 crore in three years' time.

Mughal-e-Azam was made in the 60s, but it was only in 2004 that a digitally re-recorded, computer and Dolby-enhanced version of the film saw the light of day. It was the first film to be digitally coloured for a theatre re-release (earlier Hollywood attempts primarily tried to revive TV re-runs to boost DVD sales).

The process was invented by Wilson Markle and was first used in 1970 to add colour to monochrome footage of the moon from the Apollo mission. In 1983, Markle founded Colorization, Inc ""hence the word "colorization".

It is a tedious task. Artists add the colours one at a time to each part of the individual frame. To speed up the process, the colouring is done on a computer using a digital version of the film.

The film is scanned into the computer and the artist can view the movie one frame at a time on the computer's screen. The artist draws the outline for each colour area, and the computer fills it in.

The original black-and-white film holds all of the brightness information, so the artist can paint large areas with a single colour and let the original film handle the brightness gradients. This means the artist might only have to add 10 or so actual colours to a scene.

To speed up the process even more, interpolation is common. From frame to frame, there is normally very little variation in the position of objects and actors. Therefore, the artist might manually colour every tenth frame and let the computer fill in the frames in between.

In the case of Mughal-e-Azam, the quotations to colour the old classic by western agencies ranged between Rs 45 and Rs 60 crore. However, a Mumbai firm""the Indian Academy of Arts and Animation (IAAA)""reportedly did the job for around Rs 10 crore. Today, the quotes range between Rs 2 crore and Rs 6 crore.

IAAA had designed 'Effect Plus' to achieve "natural colourisation". The actual task of colouring all 300,000 frames of the 177-minute film ""each a 10 MB file""took over 100 professionals around 10 months. First they had to restore many parts of the original negative which were badly damaged by fungus or pins.

Then the late Naushad worked on all the songs"" retaining the original voices ""but recording with a new orchestra. The entire soundtrack was re-mastered in the Dolby 6.1 'Surround Sound' format.

'Colourisation' has had its hiccups too. It was considered by some critics in the late 1980s as a "bastardisation" of film. The Writers Guild of America West called it 'cultural vandalism'.

The return on investment is decent ""profits for a colourised film range between Rs 5 and Rs 10 crore. Add CD-DVD sales to it, and the proposition appears worthwhile.