香蕉视频

An opening gala with a welcome from the president of the board of the Academy of Motion Pictures. A meetup in Switzerland to discuss how to exhibit Dorothy’s iconic red slippers from The Wizard of Oz and tell the broader story of color in film. Your work advertised on billboards throughout Los Angeles while a museum featuring your project is lit up in bright pink against the night sky.

While it sounds like something straight out of, well, Hollywood, all of these things are actually the experiences over the last year for Kirsten Moana Thompson, PhD, professor and chair of the 香蕉视频 Film and Media Department.

An expert in color-cel animation, a method of creating animated films by photographing individual drawings, Thompson served as a core member of the advisory board for the Color in Motion: Chromatic Explorations of Cinema exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.

The exhibition, which opened with a red-carpet gala last fall, was the product of a year-long collaboration between Thompson and scholars from Switzerland, Michigan and India, along with the curatorial imagination of Jessica Niebel, the museum’s senior exhibitions curator, and her staff.

The creative team behind the museum exhibition. 

Thompson has been part of a network of international color scholars who have helped develop a new research field in color studies over the last 20 years along with key archivists like Chief Curator Niebel.

“We all knew each other from conferences around the world and conversations there eventually led to this exhibition,” says Thompson. “Each person’s research specialty is reflected in the work, which was really neat to see as it came together.” 

Housed in the largest space in the new museum, the exhibition explores ways in which color has influenced cinema, and vice versa, in six distinct galleries, each focused on a different aspect of film color. The exhibition contains some instantly recognizable artifacts like Dorothy’s red slippers, Jack Nicholson’s red jacket from The Shining and a color study model of the house from Pixar’s Up.

Thompson says that while she and her colleagues’ scholarly research was the foundation for the project, they also wanted to make it fun and accessible for the general public.

“We wanted to get people touching and feeling and looking at things, help them understand the materiality of color and how it can make you feel different,” she says.

Some of the exhibits that Thompson helped curate were an interactive screen that would interpret real-time movements of color effects, as well as a recreation of avant-garde animator Oscar Fischinger’s “Lumigraph” machine that creates color when a museum-goer touches a screen.

“There are definitely some ‘trippy’ interactive experiences for people in there,” says Thompson.

While Hollywood hasn’t historically collaborated with academia, Thompson is optimistic that this project heralds the beginning of a new era.

“Understanding the enormous renaissance of scholarship in color studies has been new and interesting,” she says. “The Academy could get their heads around the project about color because it was relatively straightforward and accessible to the public. They’re now realizing the importance of scholarship in interacting with and preserving film.”

Even though the exhibition is located hundreds of miles away, the work that went into it will help inform how and what Thompson teaches in her film courses at SU.

“We not only discuss the technical aspects of color in class, but also the historical and social contexts, which is where the research for this exhibition comes into play,” says Thompson. “What we perceive as a very colorful world in cinema hasn’t always been that way and we discuss in-depth what processes and marketing influenced what we have today. It will be fun to talk about with students and reference the work that went into the exhibition.”

about the exhibition.