Colourised I Feel Fine
Real colour photo from the filming of “I Feel Fine”.
A second version of the “I Feel Fine” video showed the Beatles having a fish and chips lunch on the set.
Several music videos (promotional films in yesteryear’s language) were made by The Beatles in Twickenham studios on November 23, 1965. Some old, some new, the songs in question were “We Can Work It Out”, “Day Tripper”, “Help!”, “Ticket To Ride” and “I Feel Fine”. Tony Bramwell was producing, and he had hired a camera team from Intertel Video, filming in black and white.
The videos were included in the “1+” CD+DVD release five years ago, in their original black and white state. Come 2020 and colourising has been the big craze, because of a new, automatic technique based on machine learning. Since it became available, hobbyists have been treating black and white photos and films of the Beatles with the new technique. I don’t think our example has been done this way, since the automatic colourising process is based on simply guessing which colours clothes and other surroundings should be. This version of “I Feel Fine” has the same colours as available original colour photos snapped during the filming.
A word from the video creators: “This is a video of The Beatles miming at Twickenham studios for one of the Intertel promo videos filmed in 1965. This video took a lot of work to create and I hope that one day Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr see it. Special thanks to our friends and families who helped do the research on what color Ringo’s bike is”.
Credits:
Colorist: Leanne Nguyen
Masking & Rotoscoping: Alex Cisija
Prop Research: Leonardo Cisija
The first time colourising a Beatles video was done professionally, was when the producers of “The Beatles Anthology” decided – without telling Paul, George or Ringo about it – to colourise the “All You Need Is Love” segment from “Our World”, a program which had always been in black and white. Working from the many colour photographs taken during that day in 1967, they were able to recreate the colours quite accurately. They did one thing to reveal that it had been colourised, though: the Abbey Road studio chairs which were all red, were all coloured blue. Upon showing the finished version to George Harrison, they asked him if he noticed anything different about it. He didn’t. In his mind, this had always been in colour. Also, if you have seen the corresponding Rutles segment of “Love Life” from 1977, that was in colour. Only a part of the colourised “All You Need Is Love” clip was used in the Anthology series, but the whole song was later made available to TV companies and finally released for the fans in 2015 on the “1” CD+DVD release.
Colourisation has come a long way since then, and we predict that you will start to see many more colourised photos and videos/films in the time to come.
This is very interesting stuff. One only hopes that the BBC will get professionals in to colourise shows that were originally in colour but now only survive in black and white like Steptoe & Son. I remember the Stones in colour many times on the Ed Sullivan Show. It would be great to see the Beatles on Sullivan in colour after all these years.
This effort is extremely well done and the colors look very natural. It brings on quite an impact….makes the video less dated and lends a strong feel of seeing the Fabs more lifelike in this particular video. Bravo!
Good job, still there are some issues that need to be solved:
– light reflextions: when Georges guitar gives the reflection it should be white instead of black
– face colors: still need some work but it’s also the most difficult part as faces have not just one single color
– hair: by the coloration you could think that Paul had black and George very dark green (almost black) hair
If these problems can be sorted out it will be pretty good. Still I don’t hope that a colorized version of “A Hard Day’s Night” won’t become the only version
to watch in the future.
It’s still changing history and therefore it should only get in the right hands.
Several Beatles DVD’s in Color are available in Japan on the Valkyrie label .
So far , Ed Sullivan 2DVD , Washington DVD and In Color Vol 1 ( including all the intertel promo films .) …….vol 2 to be released shortly .
Nicely done. Fortunately, I was able to snag the 480p video and replace the audio with the 2009 CD remaster (although I had to speed it up because the video plays the song 3% too fast).
Very nicely done!! I hope they do more, and that there’s a way they “can be shared”. Valkyrie seems to be a “branch” of MisterClaudel (both are copyrighted by Peter and Wendy!). The colours are often decent to good, depending on the original, but the faces seem somewhat oversaturated, and a bit yellow/orange. There is a wealth of stuff on the In Color dvd, from Ed Sullivan (1 song – also separate Sullivan dvd) to the Cavern (not good) to Intertels to Holland, Valkyrie also has a colour Washington Coliseum which looks really good. I can send you screen caps. I think back to when the colour Shakespeare skit first appeard….