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Buster Keaton’s Iconic Stunt (clip from “Steamboat Bill Jr. [1928]), colorized & enhanced
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View Reddit by ThePastRevived – View Source
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Buster Keaton’s Iconic Stunt (clip from “Steamboat Bill Jr. [1928]), colorized & enhanced
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View Reddit by ThePastRevived – View Source
Colorization sucks.
I don’t understand doing all this work to make something look odd, plastic and worse than the original.
Love it!
There’s no camera trickery involved with the stunt, that’s a real building falling around him and he marked the “safe” standing spot with a nail. The production crew thought it was so dangerous half of them walked off set rather than witness Keaton potentially get seriously injured.
This clip was made with (eventually) 177 keyframes that were manually colored, out of 2,538 total frames.
The process is generally as follows, and goes through a lot of iterations:
1. Use Premiere to cut video clip from full film ([Original video courtesy of the Internet Archive](https://archive.org/details/steamboat-bill-jr.-reisner-1928-high-quality-1080p-h-2r-np-17ccf-u))
2. Colorize with DeOldify, which separates it into frames.
3. I picked out a number of keyframes to then colorize (or rather, fix the color) in Photoshop. This is what takes the longest.
4. I then re-ran DeOldify to use those updated keyframes to interpolate the rest of it more accurately.
5. Rinse & repeat until you’ve hit that sweet spot of “this is good enough because if I have to do it again I’m going to throw this computer out the window.”
6. Adobe Premiere again for adding watermark and creating the split-screen version.
7. Post and wait for the hate to come rolling in!
Huevos grande!
I just saw this movie a week in an old theater with a Wurlitzer organ playing the musical score. Seeing it like they showed it a hundred years ago you get the kick folks got out of silent films.