Mechanical Monsters 35mm Restoration (Patreon)

Here is the complete restoration of the 35mm print of Mechanical Monsters obtained a few years ago.

There were several major issues with the print, starting with the scan itself. The scan ended up being extremely dark, see an example below.

 Trust me when I say, the picture to the right is a full colored frame of the film. Isn't Technicolor beautiful?

Also, the archive sent the wrong file(s), and it's been a somewhat back and forth trying to get the original scan files or a brand new scan. In lieu of getting those files, I had to make due with what we had.

After changing the color space and resetting the white and blacks points and adjusting the gamma, there was still missing color data

 The black gaps in the waveform should not be there.

Another issues is that the film had many splices. Unfortunately, this was the only film of decent quality of this cartoon we've found, so we used the recent Blu-ray release version to fill in the missing scenes.

The color was done by me and Jack Theakston. We each did individual corrections, then married the two together.

All in all, probably the the most difficult print I have worked on. Billion Limited is more dark than this print. We're waiting on getting the raw files from the Archive before starting that one. But we have also acquire 3 more films being held at the Academy which are in far nicer shape, and work on those films will begin soon.