I've been obsessed by Technicolor today.

My friend Matt Kelland (of the hugely cool cutting edge digital filmmaking company Short Fuze) idly mentioned that he's a huge Fay Wray fan and that she wasn't a natural blonde and all that blonde hair was actually a wig. I read I biog on IMDB to check this out, and noticed that Fay Wray was in some early "2 colour" Technicolor films. That set me thinking. One of the things I wanted for my horror movie was really lovely saturated colour, like the old Hammer movies, or that two colour process they used to use in the 1930s, or combination of the two.

It turns out that the two colour process is called Technicolor Process 2, and the three colour one is called Process 3. It's really cool actually, as the real process involves two or three black and white film strips with colour filters at the filming end, which were combined at the print stage after being dyed the right colour to make a projectable colour film. I did a little bit of research, well two hours or so off and on, and it turns out it is in fact possible to simulate these processes, using modern digital compositing packages. Wow. How cool would it be to have the film look as though it was done in real Technicolor? Maybe I can say it was filmed in glorious Techiecolor or Technidigicolor. :)

You can do it in various compositing programs like Fusion and Shake and After Effects, and I actually found someone on the web, Patrick Sheffield, who had made free plugins for doing the same thing using Final Cut Pro. Fortunately for me I was going to use FCP to cut my horror movie so that was a really good fit. I'll be testing the filters out as soon as I get FCP sorted out on my computer.

IN any event, I'll be using SOME kind of process to make my film look like the old Technicolor horror movies, whatever that might be.

Done loads more work on the plotting of the movie, plus I've chosen my dream list of cast and crew from the pool of current and past students at the School, all trained by me. Mwah hah haaaaah. Now all I have to do is finish the script and shoot it.

"All."

Tsk!