I was wondering if they are going to put Ted's crayons in the box with him. At the time of this first being done it was so comically bad, and the jokes were ruthless. As much as I'm not a fan, the modern AI stuff is so much better without saying it's good. That's just how bad Turner's colorization was. The best colorization was Weta's footage from WWI where they used the actual uniforms in the images as reference rather than just someone adding color based on the feels.
I kind of wonder if there were color photos of the actors and scenes from the time of some of the black-and-white movies. You could use them as conversion-training-data with AI to auto-colorize the movies.
When my nephews were kids I used those old colorized movies from Turner Classics as partial proof that the old joke about the world being black, white, and shades of grey when I was kid was true. They grew up in the late 80's and early 90's watching TV shows including some great old stuff that Turner later colorized. I had told him how scientists had discovered how to improve the appearance of everything by adding other colors and as a result, scientists and artists and representatives from around the world met and collaborated on methods of colorizing everything that existed. Everyone agreed that blues would be great for the sky to lighten things up after storms; animals needed fur that blended into their environment so browns and tans like the dirt outside; rocks could be any color but earth tones (like their Mom was using in painting their house) got their names after everyone had picked colors for rocks, tree bark, leaves, etc. Plants would be green for the most part but leaves that had lightened or darkened in the fall could change colors too so every continent and country was able to decide how to color flowers and plants as they wished since coloring all flowers one color would just be boring. Snow and ice were white and water was up for grabs especially if it was in a river.
The notes they could read in the movie credits about it being a colorized version simply told them that all of the colors in that movie had been added later.
I was so convincing that one of them interrupted his teacher in class to let her know she was wrong about the rainbows and where color came from. I had made it clear that everything that we saw as colored had the colors that were assigned by international agreement after people had become tired enough of the BWG palette to sit down and make it all change.
In the end, the teacher told him he was wrong and he argued about it so I got a call one day that he had been in trouble at school and that the teacher was not thrilled to hear his explanation so I needed to clear things up for him since he was not inclined to believe her at all. I'm not sure that I ever got that completely cleared up because, to me, it was just too funny that I was the most trusted source.
Just wait until we simulate old films and media and turn them into living, breathing VR games.
We'll eventually do that for all of history. At least the history we have samples of or can plausibly recreate.
I'd imagine playing one of those might be like living your life right now. Punctuated by lots of mundane, lifelike moments.
Like reading an "internet forum" full of other period appropriate "humans".
Rightfully so if you ask me. Out the gate think about the implications of determining, say, skin color. I’m not saying “under no circumstances should it be done” but I also think people don’t appreciate the importance of the decisions made and the politics/implicit biases under the hood. I’m not even getting in to artistic intent and impact on lighting here either.
Colorizing b&w images is still debated to this day.
Because of the film technology at the time, a lot of the skin tones on set wouldn't match what you'd expect anyway due to makeup designed for the b&w film. Lots of sickly greens, yellows, and blues in place of red tones for instance.
At that point if you've already decided you want to colorize the film, there's a real question of how do you approach it, because being true to what was on set definitely isn't the right choice. So now you're playing with skin tones regardless.
Huh. That actually brings up a kind of modern parallel I hadn't thought of. A lot of action movies are done primarily, or in part, on greenscreen. The intent of using a greenscreen has nothing to do with what was captured, and more so to do with what is trying to be depicted; what ought be seen, not what is being seen by the actors and actresses.
It would be interesting to know if, in say, 100-200 years, there is some alternative technology that could de-render todays CGI perfectly, and then replace it with some alternative, perhaps insert some form of practical effect in a convincing way? Would being able to do so be better to do just because it can be done?
Like, suppose that one of the more recent big budget movies, Transformers or whatever, could entirely have all of the CGI stripped out of them instantly, and then be replaced with some form of "less fake" effects in a different way. Would it be good to do so, if that were possible? For me personally, I'm very much in favor of rubber suits and fake blood over sticks with ping pong ball overlayed with graphics. [1] In spite of my preference though, I don't know if however many hundreds of people who had worked the digital modeling for all of those scenes would appreciate essentially deleting all of the thousands of hours they had put into the movie.
Bringing that back to B&W films, I think that if someone was really excellent at doing the set design for B&W films, it makes me wonder how they might react if someone insisted on "fixing" the film by colorizing it, and showing their set pieces in a way that they never intended for those pieces to be seen by the audience. Like, if they weren't outright upset with even the idea of doing it at all, perhaps they might insist on some sort of creative control on how each of those set pieces were colorized and portrayed in the final product. Obviously, that would then extend out to all of the other things too, like wardrobe, makeup, etc. I could see the complexity ballooning out to be as complicated and involved as making the movie was to begin with! For example, maybe the guy that scouted the original location for the film wouldn't have chose the spots he had chosen if he knew that people would be able to see it on giant TVs that they could pause every single frame of, and perform all kinds of upscaling and digital zooms in and out on.
[1] I am firmly in favor of practical effects over digital for everything, except small technical errors like a boom mic or a coffee cup in a shot, because I think that the constraints a movie set faces will demand either: incredible innovative solutions by the crew, or, those constraints force directors to scale their vision back to something more contained and manageable. It helps to show where the scope creep for a movie is, and where it's simply unnecessary. For example, Jaws has a great backstory regarding the constant issues of the mechanical shark, it really forced Spielberg to rethink how and when the shark would be shown, and when it would be better to let the viewers mind fill in the blanks.
I think these are really interesting questions and I like a lot of what you’re saying. I don’t really agree with your near prohibition on CG, but I definitely get where it comes from and think that some productions definitely abuse it
Eh regarding skin color people don’t care about realism these days. You have historical remakes with totally anachronistic ethnicities in them and “no one” cares.
I mean sure, some people do, the same as some people used to complain about overrepresentation of caucasians in some old movies set in what was then called “the orient”. I think the only ones who put up a fight are the Japanese who don’t like their productions ethnically misrepresented as much.
B&W highlights the stories better. With color you get more ambient context and sometimes that’s interesting.
I think you have a misperception of the past. The actors that played the great chinese detective Charlie Chan were Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters.
> Eh regarding skin color people don’t care about realism these days. You have historical remakes with totally anachronistic ethnicities in them and “no one” cares.
This isn't exactly the same thing. Colorizing historical footage decides what the color is. A remake is an interpretation with nowhere near the same claim of accuracy and the audience 100% knows this. The social politics of this are incredibly important.
Many people don’t realize the IPCC walked back (refined as they put it) some of its most dire scenarios… others may choose to ignore the walkback. Akin to the rocket and feather phenomenon that affects pricing.
Many people were saying that things were not as dire as they claimed. I’m glad they revised but you had silly people gluing themselves to thoroughfares (cars stuck in traffic waste more energy) and vandalizing what some people consider precious art and or national patrimony in the name of climate change thinking that those most dire predictions were indeed correct and we were all headed to hell in a hand basket.
> So we are no longer worried about catastrophic or runaway climate change based on these revisions?
Don't listen to mc32, they're intentionally confusing the issue. This is the paper they're presumably referencing from last month[1].
The IPCC reports are based on a number of carbon emissions scenarios based on how the world acts: how do countries coordinate, what are the mixes of new electricity generation that come online, how are old fossil fuel plants shut down, what cars are sold, etc. In their reports they simulate multiple scenarios to show what could happen depending on the choices made, since you can't really simulate policy decisions (like presidents paying companies billions to shut down wind projects), wars (ahem), and economic changes.
There were five main scenarios in the IPCC sixth report, from very low to very high GHG emissions.
What was "walked back" is not about climate simulation or feedback loops, but they've retired the very high emissions scenario they developed in the mid 2010s of a world that went all in on heavy economic growth all powered by fossil fuels and little effort toward electrification or decarbonization.
Basically based on renewable energy prices in the years since, electrification, etc, it's just not plausible that the world will grow in that way, so it's no longer worth trying to do simulations based on it.
Note that this was literally called the "very high emissions scenario" in the report, and that's there's still a "high" emissions scenario that will be included in the seventh IPCC report as an upper bound of plausible emissions. A couple of economic models already estimated that we'll likely emit less carbon than the new upper bound high emissions scenario, the same as it was for the very high scenario in the sixth report. Like then, though, it's still worth simulating because it is at least still plausible, and you never know how things will develop sociopolitically (this paper proposes six scenarios from very low to high and a new "high to low" scenario, see section 2.3) .
That’s tough to say. Weather systems are difficult to model. We have minimal understanding of the causes or inputs that control the very long climate cycles. Like we know that some day thousands of years from now we’ll have another unstoppable glacial period. We’ll also have a period free of polar ice. Those are cyclical and independent of CO2. We cannot stop either. We live in a very precious time.
I also think we should limit or be judicious as much as we can about what we pump into the atmosphere (or oceans or ground)
There seems to be a growing movement worldwide to restrict social media to under (some teenage range). I understand some of frustration. It comes from the increase in mental health issues with minors… but they are using that as cover to overreach and impose censorship for many. An alternate method is stop social media etc from abusing their users with algorithms favoring “engament”.
It is also convient for people to have a single outside source to blame their and their children's problems on. Rather than admit their poltical and economic policies and cultural expectations might all be a bigger problem.
Even worse is it's just a small percentage of her patrons --but they have made it their temporary life-goal to change the restaurant in their image. Like, if you don't like the logo or how they went about creating the logo, go to a different restaurant and let others enjoy it without your jealous 1-star reviews.
Those same people are probably mad "desktop publishing" took the livelihoods of people who drew things by hand, used multi-media plus used exactoes and paste to bring designs to life.
As someone who grew up in the pre-computer graphic arts, in Santa Cruz ironically enough, it was not paste but hot wax. Though in the early days of computers in graphic arts, all the graphic artists were just happy to not have to deal with photo typesetters anymore...
1 star reviews, wherever they exist, are always left by a small percentage of patrons. And jealousy has nothing to do with it. Despite all the marketing budgets and hype wave, you can't force people to tolerate this stuff.
Sure but it’s not organic -it’s organized by malcontents. They’re not voting on the food or hygiene but on their purist perception of what and how a logo should look and be made. If they were blind they couldn’t give a rats ass.
If you're running a retail facing business you're going to have to reckon with the fact that people have opinions about things. And they might have reasons you think are logically unsound. Trying to debate them will probably not be very fruitful. If I saw two restaurants and one had an AI logo I'd go to the other one. Regardless of whether anyone tries to argue that I committed a logical fallacy.
No, it feels the same as any other airport. It’s like hiring roofing contractors. Either one you choose the experience is going to be pretty similar regardless of choice.
Sometimes they have artifacts -perhaps on loan, other times it’s what you can expect for a non serious museum where it seems stilted.
The food is better than most airports and often they are outposts of known restaurants though not as good as the actual main restaurants that have locations in the area.
It’s still an airport and most people are just transiting and not too interested in the exhibits. They might as well have community college students put up their work there and few would be the wiser.
We would not be in the pickle we are if she didn’t mindlessly scare and misinform people undermining a whole industry based on her misunderstanding.
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