A Digital Humanities Approach to Film Colors

In the framework of the research project FilmColors funded by an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) a range of computer-assisted methods are developed and applied to investigate the relationship between color film technology and aesthetics. A large group of four hundred films ranging from the invention of cinema to the mid-1990s is being investigated by a combination of a video annotation tool and a structured protocol provided by a custom-made film analysis database. These human-based analyses are then being extended by (semi)automatic tools that apply deep learning and neural networks to extract meaningful color schemes from the films. Ultimately these tools will be integrated into an online crowdsourcing platform for the analysis of color films. By publishing the sources and the results of the research project on the Timeline of Historical Film Colors—a comprehensive resource for all topics related to film colors—the outcome of the research project will be available to researchers, film archivists, and the general audience interested in the topic.