Mark Twain at Stormfield (1909) [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
There's always the ethical and artistic arguments around colorizing and so forth, but if one of the values of old video reels is to connect our conscience to the past, it's my opinion that smoothing, colorizing, de-noising and so forth can be benefits in that goal, even if the frames are no longer "authentic". (It's not like the real Twain was choppy and black-and-white)
So what? I just don't get this. Can't we just enjoy a much improved film experience?
> so we can connect to their recorded legacy, and removing sociological barriers, which we probably want to preserve.
Nobody is suggesting destroying the originals.
If you hadn’t had a picture of your grandma at all, would you want AI to generate one based on a description of her and tell you it’s a picture of your grandma?
There's another of a colorized ancient movie of a trolley ride in Europe. It's very fun to watch.
Ya know, when people restore old cars, if they want to drive them, they'll usually do a few upgrades to make the car safer and more driveable. And there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm curious. Do you ever watch and enjoy movies from the 20's and 30's? For the silent flicks, do you think that the music played during the screening by some random starving artist plinking on a crummy piano or squeaking away on a violin is part of the "vision" of the director?
Lots of people today simply turn away from any movie that is black and white.
There’s a reason video sites offer a filter for HD and YouTube videos get keyword stuffed for 8k even when they aren’t.
I am very curious how Apple’s spatial video lands.
From reviewer descriptions, the experience is such a major change from standard HD video I am wondering if depthscaling “old” video will become a thing too.
I seriously doubt dialog cards are part of any director's "vision".
The bad music slapped on the DVDs is also a serious turnoff. Music easily makes or breaks a movie. For example, the music on Lord of the Rings adds greatly to my enjoyment of it. The Hobbit music is utterly forgettable, and makes the poor movie even worse.
For another example, the movie "Hawaii" has a most excellent music soundtrack. Its sequel, "The Hawaiians", has a completely forgettable soundtrack, which contributes to the movie falling flat on its face.
I suspect much of "Star Wars" success came from the music.
We’re not that far away from doing things like have AI remove “icky cigarettes” and “poisonous alcohol” to make it lots of fun for zoomers to watch.
I think disclosure is high priority here. If you know it's been cleaned up, and colourized, then you can watch it as you would the original.
Because, what I think people are saying here is that older cameras already have made the equivalent of "someone guessing". The framerate is variable and jumps, the colour is off and variable, rhe film is degraded, and even the people in the films act quite unnatural, for they are very aware of being filmed.
I get what you mean about authenticity, but I think full disclosure takes care of that.
In media we use colour to exaggerate the differences of the past, to make it feel different and foreign to our senses, rather than represent them accurately. So if you want a more accurate representation then you absolutely should be training your models on modern video.
1. Yes, they already do add some foley effects. But very little.
2. Yes, they do add a music soundtrack. But it's almost always awful period music.
> the ethical and artistic arguments
Those are all baloney. Doing what I suggest does not destroy the originals in any way. It's simply making the movies more enjoyable. Apparently, a lot of purists want people to suffer watching them: suffer with grainy, blotchy film, difficult to make out flickering black & white, and bad piano music.
There's a reddit newsgroup where people colorize old B+W photos. They really do an amazing job. By colorizing key frames in a movie, ML can take care of the rest.
BTW, I've seen many bad attempts at colorizing old footage, like those "WW2 In Color" documentaries. You can always tell because the teeth & gums of the people are grey :-/ and the faces are a uniform brown. ML ought to be able to do a lot better.
>Those are all baloney. Doing what I suggest does not destroy the originals in any way. It's simply making the movies more enjoyable. Apparently, a lot of purists want people to suffer watching them: suffer with grainy, blotchy film, difficult to make out flickering black & white, and bad piano music.
I think there's 2 separate issues actually: there's the "artist's intent", and then there's refusal to utilize any modern technology. The latter I agree is baloney: if you can use modern technology to clean up and improve old stuff (such as taking an original Star Wars film print and removing the scratches in the film, improving flaws in the FX, etc.), I think it's ridiculous to argue against that kind of thing. Then there's the artist's intent: if the original artist intended that the movie have "bad piano music" as you call it, should you be changing that? It's like changing the dialog in Lord of the Rings so the characters all talk like modern American hipsters: how is this helpful? These movies are a product of their time, and the music is too.
If you could bring the original artists back from the dead, and ask them if they'd like to use modern technology to clean up their old silent movies to sharpen them, remove the noise, etc., I'm sure they'd agree: why wouldn't they want the print to look as good as possible? If you ask them about colorizing, there might be some debate; some might like it, others might not. It's not like they had a choice back then, but even today some people like B&W photos for artistic reasons. If you ask them about adding modern music, I don't think they'd like that much at all.
If I made a movie, I'd be pleased if people far in the future watched it. If that meant using their technology to improve it, that's fine with me. After all, I've suggested to many people that they improve my game Empire with modern graphics and AI and sound.
Look up Fury Road: Black and Chrome. And take a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz-30KI2bsw
Anyone who studied Media Theory will be well aware of the ubiquitous Marshall McLuhan quote, “The medium is the message,” and understands that the means with which a piece of media is produced and distributed tells a story in and of itself. Sometimes that’s in service to the broader narrative, and sometimes it’s simply a product of circumstance, but either way it carries its own value for the audience, and I would argue that it would be arrogant for one to unilaterally decide whether such things are important or not to preserve.
> ... Apparently, a lot of purists want people to suffer watching them
The tech and information of the time is worth preserving, as is the experience. I, for one, enjoy seeing the original, more analog versions of things. I cringe inside when I watch much of ML filtered or otherwise artificially colorized footage. Many films were shot with the intent of leveraging the strengths of the medium. Limitation often promotes its own form of innovation which can only be recognized in the context it was created in.
Saying that purists want people to suffer is quite misleading. A similar statement in the other direction might be, ML enthusiasts want people to forget what art actually is.
Ever listen to a Gregorian chant? They are cool, partially because they had no idea what they were (musically) doing... much like the product of an ML model today.
Not at all. I've watched enough movies where the director clearly wanted the viewer to suffer, based on the idea that only through suffering can the viewer be enlightened. The suffering is in the form of making a bad movie.
Solaris comes to mind. I've tried to watch it multiple times, but the director (and the director's fans) clearly revel in the notion that one must suffer through the movie, and that's the point of it. The movie is boring on every level - bad dialog, bad plot, bad cinematography, bad pacing, bad acting, everything is bad about it. And it's (small) number of fervent fans love it for its wretchedness. They can keep it :-)
I saw a colorized version of Metropolis a few decades ago. The technology to do it right wasn't there, but it was enjoyable in a way the original was not. I've since watched the full version when the missing footage was found, and there's an ideal film that would benefit from the application of modern technology. I bet Fritz Lang would love it.
TCM also ran a version of the silent "Wings". They added some color in a few spots, and some airplane engine sounds. Even just that little bit made the picture much more watchable.
I'd like to see the FM Busby musicals fixed up.
Some movies I wouldn't touch would be Top Hat. It's perfect as it is :-)
In case of old media, I think their historical value is not in their own existence but in their effect on people of the time.
Older movies were perceived back in time through the old technology, that is b/w, small screen, choppy, silent or with musical accompaniment.
It's a document, similar to language dialects used back in time - localizing this for present time would shave away the cultural skin it had for its time.
It's a bit closer to theater or reading a book. It's less directly realistic. Somehow your brain fills the gaps more and you get even more invested.
It’s quite hard with such low quality footage. I think could be done is use some sort of algorithm to stop that sort of wavy chemical look that might be beyond me anyway that video did clean up a bit!
I think I can do better though, so will try another method in the morning.
One other downside of this kind of approach is it makes high quality versions of the source significantly harder to find (I doubt the 240p encoding with blocks bigger than Mark Twain's head is the best copy of the source available).
Most images taken with a smartphone today don't capture reality reliably either, and you're allowed to alter them to look whichever way is most pleasing.
Even our eyes perceive reality slightly differently, and photography is not much different. If anything, looking at 2D reproductions of reality adds another layer of subjective perception.
Even compression algorithms can hallucinate: https://www.theregister.com/2013/08/06/xerox_copier_flaw_mea...
I want my historical records to be processed only with simple algorithms that help me see what is really there.
1. https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/
2. https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/origins-of-motion-pictures/maybe he would have made an exception to meet Twain however.
Edison was obsessed with making money from the patents he had, applying them to anybody making movies; the reason Hollywood (the industry) is in LA is that filmmakers fled the East Coast to the wild west to get away from Edison's lawsuits.
so perhaps (speculating) if Edison was spending a lot of time with lawyers, I tend to doubt he was doing the filming.
Mark Twain was a celebrity though, so perhaps it was a friendly visit.
According to Mark Twain researcher Robert Slotta, who has studied the origins of this film for several years, it all began as a simple intro to a feature film Thomas Edison wanted to make based on Twain's 1881 novel, "The Prince and the Pauper" (published in America 1882). Twain reluctantly agreed as long as the material was never used for any other purpose. The intro consisted an edited version of the first three scenes of this film. Scenes included: Twain standing in the doorway, the walk around the house, and the second walk around was another "take" to cover a late camera start on the part of the cinematographer.
Since there was still unexposed film left over, it was at the film crew’s urging that the scenes with Twain and his daughters, Clara and Jean, be photographed as a gift with the promise that footage was strictly for their own private enjoyment.
(Submitted title was "Mark Twain filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909")
I believe this is a surviving excerpt from https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0001008/
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old [1]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds
Attitudes about "all my friends must agree with each other and me" were different then.
It's a pity that there is no audio in this video, but if the image is clean enough and we have an AI that can read lips.. one can only hope.
Also, playing this back at 0.5x makes everyone move normal.
One about his life would be interesting enough, if done well. He spend lots of it as a tramp on the streets. There he learned to tell good stories out of neccesity, because he needed to find ways to convince people to give him various things like food and shelter ..
Hollywood already can (and has) brought Mark Twain into movies by use of an actor. There’s nothing really different about this act in that lens if it’s done with AI.
"Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment."
[1] https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/emily.klotz/engl1301-13/co...
I wonder if Twain had particularly difficult parents, hence his view.
Those rare kids that would listen to such advice have plenty of people telling it to them anyway.
"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."
Twain is an interesting character. But he shouldn't always be read in a straightforward manner.
(Let it be known I intended to respond with this link before I knew who they had as the representative image for the article)
Henry Thoreau
"The idyllic tableau of peace and genteel elegance was the image he [Twain] wanted seen and remembered. The carefully cultivated projection of a happy family, an elderly father with his patrician daughters (both looking well and pretty), was an opportunity for the media-savvy Twain to recapture some of the credibility he must have felt he had lost in his battle with Isabel and Ashcroft."
From Mark Twain's Other Woman by Laura Skandera Trombley. It explores the forgotten media scandals and controversies that plagued the last years of Twain.
The others parts with him in the doorway and walking around the house probably were very carefully choreographed as you suggest.