Monday, May 23, 2011

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910)

In Mark Evan Swartz's Oz Before the Rainbow, he suggested that the 1910 Wonderful Wizard of Oz may have also been available in a color tinted version.

I decided to run with that idea. I ripped the video from a DVD as an MPEG-2 file, the same quality you get on the disc. For extra picture clarity, I sharpened it and used auto level to decrease the amount of gray colors in the video. Then, using the duotone filter, I tinted each set of scenes in a different country, based on the colorings used for the illustrations in the original edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Kansas is sepia, the Munchkin Country is blue, the Emerald City is green, and the domain of the Witch is yellow.

Instead of just slapping a random music track on it, I used music from incompetech.com.



I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with this, so this will be my YouTube version. I may do further alterations in the coloring and music and put it on a DVD.

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