Trivia Tuesday: Cisco and Technicolor

[npetrele]

Did you know that Cisco acquired set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta back in 2005? Cisco later sold its set-top box business to Technicolor in late 2015. 

Speaking of Technicolor, do you know how Technicolor brought color to cartoons in the 1940s? (Well, color films in general, but I'm a cartoon geek.) Technicolor started with three layers of black and white film. The camera split colors into red, green, and blue, and exposed the three layers separately with each color. The three layers of film were still in black and white when developed. But Technicolor would dye those three layers in their respective colors and then laminate the layers into a single film. And if you think about it, the concept of combining red, green and blue for all possible colors continued into the original way to get color in color TVs and monitors. 

Nowadays, some computer-driven cartoon restoration technique actually start with a black-and-white cartoon and assign colors based on a restoration operator and gray values. It's wonderful that we can use modern computers for this purpose, but I still think the Technicolor approach was very clever. 

Can you think of any other clever filming techniques? How about this? Without googling it, do you know how early filmmakers produced a Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation in a black-and-white film in one continuous take with no film editing? 

[npetrele]

Okay, I'll give away the Jekyll and Hyde trick. They put different colors of makeup on the actor to make him look like Hyde. Then they used filters with colors that matched the makeup, thus causing the makeup to be invisible to the camera. They removed the filters one at a time, which caused the camera to "see" more and more of the makeup, making it look like the actor was turning into Mr. Hyde. Very clever for the 1930s film making. 

[npetrele]

Here's some interesting (to me, anyway) trivia I learned. Do you remember cartoons with this screen? "Merrie Melodies" weren't a different brand of cartoons than Looney Tunes, as I once thought as a child. Film was costly and producing new cartoons was costly, too. So they simply cut out the opening credits of existing cartoons to save on film sent to theaters, and slapped the blue ribbon "Merrie Melodies" label on them. Re-runs, in other words.

[npetrele]

My final bit of cartoon trivia: How many of you know who Carl W. Stalling is? He's one of my favorite composers. You'll see his name on almost every WB cartoon, and some Disney cartoons. He used a technique called "mousing", where he used music to emphasize all the actions, even a cartoon character walking. He also used tons of quotes of everything from popular songs to classical music. In fact, much of my early knowledge of classical music came from watching Looney Tunes. I eventually studied music theory and composition for 10 years before getting into computers. Thanks, Mr. Stalling, for your inspiration.