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Want to make new video look like old TV? Check out this commercial I aged to look 1970s.
I did the Super Sled one at the end. The other ones have some generic film scratches, some flicker and some vignietting.
But that treatment merely gives the impression of trying to look old. The directors and I wanted Super Sled to look like a real ad from the 1970s. They gave me full freedom to degrade the beautiful animation with my techniques.
First thing I did was research. Look at real old commercials and see how they look when they aren't well preserved. I looked at this one a lot. Specifically how color shifts in fade in and fade out.
then I came up with a history for this video, and tried to depict the various technologies involved in this... like geologic layers, each technology added its own signature quirks to the image. I asked myself, how would this have been made in the 1970s?
So I started with that. I imagined it was shot on film. On a cheap animation camera that didn't have a good lens and wasn't necessarily clean. That means dirt, film grain and scratches on the film negative.
It also means titles get superimposed on a second, misregistered (weaving) exposure pass before printing. I assumed dirt and scratches on the color print as well.
So now we have something that looks like old film. but this old film would have been run through a cheap tele-cine machine. That introduces vignetting, more weave, a dirty gate, a limited color-palette and color shifts as we fade-in and fade-out.
Oh, I forgot, on the "film" I also added sync marks, reel-change cigarette burns and other film leader artifacts.
I also added some blocks mimicking Vertical Interval Time Code.
Then I imagined it was broadcast, so I added some of the artifacts you see like static from a tv broadcast. And to give the feel it was recorded on VHS, I limited the color again, pumped a lot of misapplied chroma noise, and mimicked a tracking issue along the bottom.
