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The Forgotten 'China Girls' Hidden at the Beginning of Old Films
- pizza 10y agoSo Lena in image processing has more history to it than I might have thought. edit: more than just the USC origin story, I mean - http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~chuck/lennapg/lenna.shtml
- kafkaesq 10y agoFascinating. The term most likely had nothing to do with the Bowie song (which apparently was inspired by one of Iggy Pop's romantic interests, who was Vietnamese). But it does suggest some interesting (unintended) interpretations of the lyrics: the "China Girl" not a fetish object, or even simply an unattainable romantic partner -- but rather a talisman, or a blank slate; which, the more you look at, the more you project into. Or in Bowie's words, When I look at my China girl / I could pretend that nothing really meant too much / When I look at my China girl / I stumble into town just like a sacred cow / Visions of swastikas in my head / Plans for everyone / It's in the whites of my eyes
- sevensor 10y agoI was hoping there was a connection! Even if there's not, it makes the song richer. Iggy Pop's version gives me chills.
- donretag 10y agoYou cannot be certain those are Bowie's words since Iggy Pop co-wrote the song and recorded it six years before Bowie.
- ebbv 10y agoPretty sure the Iggy Pop song is about heroin.
- roryrjb 10y agoReminds me of the intro to Ingmar Bergman's Persona. I guess that may have be an allusion to this, as well as Brechtian Alienation technique/"breaking the 4th wall".
- Joeboy 10y agoWhen I was growing up in the UK you'd see this[1] on the TV regularly, sometimes for hours at a time. [1] http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/testcards/images/169_testcards/BBCHD_testcard_big.jpg http://hub.tv-ark.org.uk/images/testcards/images/169_testcar...
- rwmj 10y agoProbably better to link to the very rich history of the Test Card: http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/testcards/bbc.html http://www2.tv-ark.org.uk/testcards/bbc.html
- schoen 10y agoWikipedia also has some information on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Hersee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Hersee
- tomn 10y agoThat's a great link, thanks. I was actually looking for an image of testcard 61 (at the bottom of that page), a copy of which I saw being used only a few years ago! 57 is interesting too; the black square in the centre is actually a hole leading into a box lined with black felt, to provide a black reference. The generation and use of test cards and patterns is a surprisingly complicated subject; even in the digital age.
- vidarh 10y agoA close variation of test card G on that page is common in a long list of countries, as it came from a highly successful commercially available test-card generator, and the pattern has since been copied and modified all over the place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_PM5544 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_PM5544
- vanderZwan 10y agoYeah, I remember that image. I always thought it was a weird oppressive robot face staring at me, like some kind of Big Brother in the television. I even had a nightmare as a kid once believing the TV came alive and turned into a robot slowly chasing after me like a zombie.
- sparky_ 10y agoThis is genuinely interesting. I had no idea this was a part of film history. Perhaps a side effect of coming age during the digital era. Thanks OP!
- acqq 10y agoEven with the digital technology, we still need the test pictures and both the human faces and the cards in them: http://www.thehurlblog.com/film-education-testing-your-cameras-latitude/ http://www.thehurlblog.com/film-education-testing-your-camer... http://niximages.com/blog/?page_id=20207 http://niximages.com/blog/?page_id=20207 http://www.colour-science.com/quality%20test%20tools/test%20files/test%20files%20overview.htm http://www.colour-science.com/quality%20test%20tools/test%20... http://www.gballard.net/photoshop/pdi_download/ http://www.gballard.net/photoshop/pdi_download/ http://blog.kasson.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/generic-calibration-image.jpg http://blog.kasson.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/generic-ca... http://previews.123rf.com/images/spaxia/spaxia1411/spaxia141100034/33888976-model-with-color-test-card-isolated-on-white-background-Stock-Photo.jpg http://previews.123rf.com/images/spaxia/spaxia1411/spaxia141...
- Neliquat 10y agoIn the end, no matter the actual data, its human reception that matters. This seems to bear repeating.
- RichardCA 10y agoPeople are drawn to this sort of thing because it evokes a certain sense of accidental surrealism. When you see an image like that in the middle of watching something else, your brain reacts to it. A good example might be the twins from The Shining, which Kubrick borrowed from Diane Arbus. There's an artist by the name of Stan Brakhage who built an entire career out of exploring this effect. And once you watch one or two of his films you begin to see his influence everywhere.
- cyberferret 10y agoI was watching some old episodes of "The Young Ones" on NetFlix a while back, and noticed that they did this in their show quite a lot - each episode had at least one or two images inserted randomly in them for a split second. Nothing to do with the episode story at all. I was intrigued because I never noticed them decades ago when watching the original series - they are far more obvious to me now. Must have been a common technique at the time, because I remember watching another English show from the same era (the name of the show escapes me), which did the same thing.
- sweis 10y agoDid you ever notice the 5th Young Ones roommate?
- cyberferret 10y agoThat was the OTHER thing that freaked me out when I finally noticed it only recently. I thought he/she was only in a couple of scenes, but then I read a blog post about it which showed him/her in a myriad of other scenes that I had completely missed too!
- Freak_NL 10y agoHuh. I never knew. Someone gathered all the scenes containing him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG2L4QtAGGQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG2L4QtAGGQ It looks like an in-joke of the production team. To be fair, The Young Ones was already quite surrealistic in its humour (e.g., a talking Glaswegian hamster).
- jimmywanger 10y agoFTA: > By the 1990s, it was finally dawning on film creators and processors, too, that using a white-skinned person as the universal standard was short-changing people of every other skin tone. I don't quite understand this statement. The point of the China Girl was having a fairly agreed upon color to make sure the film was developed properly. As long as you were pretty sure what the color was supposed to be, you could kind of judge how good the film was. Introducing other ethnicities would defeat the purpose.
- mkesper 10y agoYou want to be sure other skin tones are right, too.
- jimmywanger 10y agoYou do that by holding swatches of known colors and calibrating that way. If you have say mixed race models or models of a race you're not familiar with, it would be worse than useless. Somebody with east asian features but western european skin tone would throw off an entire movie.
- irb 10y agoYes, but it's not as though western Europeans all have exactly the same skin tone either - you can still make the wrong assumption. I think the idea would be to have multiple people with different skin tones so that you can check that they all look ok.
- Gibbon1 10y agoReminds me of an older nerds comment about the NTSC Color TV standard . AKA 'Never The Same Color' The techs at the TV station would adjust the transmission so skin tones 'looked right' and left it at that.
- jecel 10y agoEven when it isn't what the lab guys were expecting: http://www.startrek.com/article/trouble-keeping-her-green http://www.startrek.com/article/trouble-keeping-her-green
- rabboRubble 10y agoDon't forget the Shirley Cards! http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-shirley-cards-set-photography-s-skin-tone-standard http://www.npr.org/2014/11/13/363517842/for-decades-kodak-s-...
- slim 10y agoRe: "China Girls" origin. Maybe the first film to have those test images was a Fujifilm and the girls were japanese
- yiyus 10y agoTip: if you want to see a few of these girls while listening to a good song, you should check the closing credits of Death Proof by Tarantino.
- 6stringmerc 10y agoVery interesting. I worked in a theater at a time when reels still were assembled and test screened usually the night before. Got to see the machines and operation up close and personal. Very technical and highly engineered equipment. Closer to clocks and watches than run-of-the-mill consumer equipment - might be of interest to have a look at the history of the devices!
- fallingfrog 10y agoHuh, I never knew what that David Bowie song was about!
- rhapsodic 10y agoHere's an example: https://youtu.be/zAzHQIkOQ4U?t=50s https://youtu.be/zAzHQIkOQ4U?t=50s It's at the beginning of a movie within a movie.