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My research, focusing on film remakes and translations of TV adaptations, is rooted in the digital humanities. That means that I use digital tools to extract and manage data from audiovisual documents. My approach consists of reverse-engineering films and TV series episodes. I deconstruct them and isolate the different elements to compare them with each other. In this section, I focus on light and color. I have selected some film remakes, adaptations, and French movies related to my MLL 219 French Contemporary Cinema class. 

 

The combination of toolkits Mpeg Streamclip and ImageJ effectively generates impressionistic visuals. Using MPEG Streamclip, I divide the entire movie or TV series episode into stacks of frames. Though movies are typically shot with 24 Frames/second, I use only one frame per second for convenience sake. Next, I use the toolkit Image J to create a montage out of the pictures stacked into a single picture. The result is a mosaïc of frames that provides us with information on color and light.

 

ImageJ is a software created by Lev Manovich. The first version dates from 2012 (https://imagej.nih.gov/ij/plugins/image-montage/index.html). Image J allows to make a montage of images based on the episode's frames previously extracted with MPEG Streamclip. ImageJ uses algorithms to visually analyze and organize large quantities of images at the macro level. ImageJ provides an impressionistic composition of images. For instance, all the movie frames can be displayed on a single picture (see below.