Film colorization takes on a new look.

For a while, film colorization was an endangered species.

To begin with, it looked bad, as many viewers of Ted Turner's early efforts to colorize classic black-and-white films can attest.

Added woes came with the strong anti-colorization backlash, led by such directors as Woody Allen. Those purists claimed that colorizing a black-and-white film was the technological equivalent of spray-painting graffiti on the Mona Lisa.

But now that backlash has subsided, and colorization is popping up in the strangest places - television commercials, music videos, television series and even first-run theatrical movies. And CST Entertainment Inc., the last remaining colorization company in the nation, has single-handedly led the way.

Founded in 1983, CST had only one profitable quarter in its first decade of operation. Jody Shapiro came on board as the company's president and chief operating officer in October 1993, and has cut the company's losses dramatically since then.

In that time, the company has made significant investments in equipment and has brought on a new management team. It has also opened new markets in the world of commercial and music video production.

CST employs about 160 people, up from 90 a year and a half ago.

CST's revenues for the six months ended Dec. 31 were $3.4 million, up from $493,000 in the same period the previous year. During the six months of 1994, the company posted a net loss of $974,000, down from a net loss of $1.5 million a year earlier.

Painting pictures

"When I first came here, they didn't even want to use the word 'colorization,'" Shapiro said. "But it is really just another digital effect."

The concept behind film colorization is simple yet incredibly time-intensive. First, the footage is shot on black-and-white film. Then, individual "masks" - or places where a given color will go - are drawn by technicians with computers onto each frame of film. CST's software allows it to create 258 such masks per scene.

Once the masks are made and the colors assigned, the colors are then plugged into each frame of the film - with 24 frames making up a single second of footage, or 86,400 frames per hour. The company employs three shifts working around the clock on 60 computer workstations.

CST charges between $2,000 and $3,000 a minute of film time for normal colorization. Special effects colorization can run up to $30,000 for each minute of film.

CST has survived where others - most notably American Film Technologies Inc. - have closed up shop for two reasons, said Shapiro.

For starters, Shapiro said, the company has kept upgrading its technology - changing from the original analog-style of colorization to digital technology, for example, which increased the available color spectrum from about 16 colors to 16.8 million.

Diverse palette

Secondly, Shapiro said, the company looked for markets beyond the colorization of old movies. That led to the company's first assignment for a commercial production company a little more than a year ago.

Soon, word had spread that CST could provide commercial directors a vast array of colors and looks from which to set their works apart. In some cases, people are given blue faces. In others, the natural colors are heightened, giving the piece a surreal look. In still others, CST mixes black-and-white with colorized footage to highlight a given product - like a bottle of Miller beer.

The technique can also be used to overcome shortcomings in a natural film setting - creating blue skies on a gray, cloudy day, for example, or lush green hills in the middle of winter.

"The directors can create anything they want, and believe me, these people like to manipulate their footage," said Stanton Rutledge, executive vice president of CST. "(Colorization) is essentially post-production art direction."

That edge has helped CST to land work colorizing commercials for some of the biggest advertising agencies in town - a Toyota spot for Saatchi & Saatchi, an American Express ad for Ogilvy & Mather, and a Coca-Cola commercial for Creative Artists Agency. Some 50 different commercials were digitally colorized by CST last year.

One such commercial producer/director is Tony Kaye, founder of West Hollywood's Tony Kaye Films Inc., who used CST's technique to create strikingly color-saturated images for a recent Dunlop tires commercial.

"I wanted to create an interesting look, and I'd always thought that colorization was a technique that could be used in a creative way," Kaye said.

"When the Dunlop thing came along, I thought that it would be a good time to try colorization out, and I was very pleased with the result."

Recording artists from Green Day to Janet Jackson, from Jackson Browne to Soul Asylum, have used CST colorization on their music videos.

Colorization blues

But it wasn't always so.

"We were taboo in the early 1980s," said Rutledge. "Before, colorization was seen as destroying film, even though the process never touches the original copies.

"But now, CST is thought of as part of the production process. We're becoming friends with the directing and production company."

And this, in turn, has led the company back to colorizing larger projects - such as the Warner Bros. cartoon library and segments of a new TV show for Rysher Entertainment and Fox Broadcasting called "VR 5."

CST is also taking old television shows and B-movies, colorizing them, re-editing them for modern audiences and then providing modern rock-and-roll soundtracks to create essentially new television shows and series.

One such venture created "Wyatt Earp: Return to Tombstone," which was produced by CST Entertainment for CBS. A science-fiction serial and jungle-based serial are also being explored, Shapiro said.

And as for colorization's old foes? Many of them are still out there, most recently sounding off against Trimark Pictures' decision to colorize the movie "Federal Hill."

The film, originally shot in black and white, was colorized by CST at the request of Trimark, the movie's distributor. The film's director, Michael Corrente, has condemned that move to the Artists Rights Foundation.

Woody Allen was also among those weighing in, saying colorization without the director's consent is "criminal." Trimark later recanted, saying the movie's theatrical release would be in black-and-white, with a video version colorized under the director's supervision.

But, even Woody Allen is not completely opposed to colorization. He maintains that the process is perfectly acceptable as long as it is done with the director's consent - as when Allen last year brought some black-and-white footage of a 1920s Times Square to CST, which colorized the clip for inclusion in Allen's full-color movie, "Bullets Over Broadway."