CineMagic (film technique)

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CineMagic was the name of film development technique invented by 3-D movie producer Sidney W. Pink and Norman Maurer in the 1959 science-fiction movie The Angry Red Planet to cast a pinkish glow over the screen. The point of the technique was to make the actors look more like cartoons so they could fit into less realistic backgrounds, the overall effect being that the movie would look more impressive even with a smaller budget.

The method employed the printing of a positive and negative monochromatic image on the same film, essentially turning the camera into a detector for drastic changes in brightness, such as on the edges of a light figure against a dark background. A red wash was placed over the whole image. This proved to be an expensive method.

In the aforementioned film, action scenes were intercut with shots of a drawing of the ruins of a distant city; it was hoped that the unusual coloration would distract the viewer from noticing that nothing was happening in the city, the camera just slowly zoomed in.