Colour special: Historically accurate colours
Posted on Aug 15, 2025 by Admin
Blast from the past
Gelato VFX’s Eddy Strickland outlines the processes involved in adding historically accurate colours to vintage film footage
Words Katie Kasperson
Adding colour to monochrome film is an endlessly challenging process – just ask Eddy Strickland, VFX supervisor at Gelato VFX. Not only does it require painstaking attention to detail and refined artistic skill, but it also demands contextual awareness to ensure historical accuracy.
While Gelato VFX is ‘a traditional VFX house’, according to Strickland, handling CGI and motion graphics, its speciality is colourisation and colour restoration. “Colourisation has been around more or less in the same form it’s always been since it started decades ago,” begins Strickland. “For flesh tones, everyone’s got the same skin. It’s flat and floats above the surface of the video,” he argues.
At Gelato VFX, Strickland continues, “we wanted to avoid that. About eight years ago, we started developing a pipeline for black & white image colourisation with a view of trying to go for something more photorealistic – that is, as close to the actual event as possible,” he explains. “We’re striving to do something that’s passable as original colour.”
To ensure the colours are authentic, Strickland and his team work closely with historians and researchers “who create a reference bible for every shot,” he says. “It starts general, like what dyes and pigments would be available in the year the film was shot, and then specifics based on the project.” Perhaps as expected, Gelato handles a lot of war footage, which can date back to the late 1800s. “We spend a huge amount of time painting all of this work up. It’s the correct colours for uniforms, guns, as well as a lot of medals and ribbons. We try to get as much of the real grit in as possible.”
Colourisation tasks can be challenging
Down to the details
When Strickland says ‘paint’, he means paint. “We don’t do automatic colourisation or anything like that. We have to manually paint everything. It’s a team of artists who do that and pick the correct colours, led by information from the history team.” (That said, Gelato also hosts a separate scan store, which sells high-res maps of everyday objects like fruits, bricks and fabrics.)
For older footage, which is all monochrome, Strickland and his team create colour from scratch. For more recent footage, which is often already colourised, “we end up switching to restoration rather than colourisation,” he explains – fixing the original footage rather than changing it altogether.
“It’s all challenges, all the way down,” Strickland admits, often handling film that’s ‘80 years old as a minimum’. “In VFX, we’re used to being handed stunning plates off a RED camera, where there’s all this data. It’s wonderful, it’s pristine, it’s perfect. It’s very much the opposite when you’re dealing with this other kind of footage,” he states. “We’ve got missing frames. We have to take out dust and scratches; things like that. Any kind of flickering or changes in luma values, we’ve also got to mitigate.
“Effectively, we approach it like a modern rush,” Strickland continues. “We want to hand it over to a colourist so they can then treat it how they would treat any other shot. We want to give them everything in that plate that they can possibly use to get the most out of it.”
Gelato tries to match the material’s original era closely
Restore, release, repeat
It’s no secret that Hollywood often opts for repetition, cashing in on existing IP to create ‘guaranteed hits’, Strickland describes. Remasters and rereleases are one way to do this, with The Lord of the Rings and Jaws restorations (the latter celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) being recent examples. But audiences can often be nitpicky when it comes to remasters, with some arguing that these processes separate a film from its era. Gelato’s dedication to historical accuracy avoids this complaint, maintaining the look and feel of each film’s vintage.
While the bulk of Strickland’s work is in factual documentaries, “we’ve actually had a massive array of different projects,” he shares. “We’ve done a lot for biopics, and a lot of war stuff because it sells. Perhaps at this point in time, it’s important to tell those stories again,” he suggests, “to remind everyone what happened and how to avoid things like that in the future.”
Gelato’s latest projects include a true crime series (Scary Tales of New York) and a couple of D-Day retellings (Liberation: D-Day to Berlin, for example). The VFX studio is also working on an upcoming biopic, colourising archival footage of the film’s subject, which will supposedly be placed in the end credits.
Strickland has spent nearly 20 years in the industry, and demand for colourised archival content has yet to dwindle. In fact, it’s artistic expertise, combined with niche historical knowledge, that likely keeps Gelato VFX afloat. “There’s still a great interest,” Strickland says of the craft – and it’s his team’s goal to ‘make the footage look properly stunning’.
To learn more about Gelato’s services and recent work, visit gelato-vfx.com
This article appears in the July/August 2025 issue of Definition
