I’ve been using DaVinci Resolve to make black-and-white versions of movies for a while now. It span out of my photography, trying to see more in that way for composition and lighting. I started with “The Shadow” (1994) and “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” (2004), partially because they were also more period-appropriate that way. They also look look better than the original versions.
There’ve been a few official black-and-white releases in the last few years; “Mad Mad: Fury Road”, “Logan Noir” and even a new version of “Johnny Mnemonic”. That last one never got a release in the UK, so I took the extended Japanese cut that was uploaded onto the Internet Archive and converted that.
I found that even if black-and-white didn’t change a movie much visually, it made a difference in… I hate to use this word… the “vibe”. “The Faculty” becomes a real 50’s throwback, “The Usual Suspects” noir leanings even more pronounced.
I’m a (low-key) defender of “Alien Vs Predator” (2004) on this basis. As a main entry in either series, it’s a bad movie. If you see it as a throwback to the old monster mash-ups of the 40’s and 50’s, it’s a fun time. It’s not an accident an on-screen TV is showing “Frankenstein meets the Wolfman”. I took the conversion a couple of steps further than usual in Resolve. Not just monochrome, but film grain throughout and dirt during the prologue. I changer the sound to mono and even swapped in the 50’s version of the Fox fanfare (with a “Presented in Cinemascope” title). Since it was shot on film, it looks really good in a way I never appreciated in colour. There’s great use of shadow to give a haunted house quality to the setting.
A few days after I finished it, I started thinking about what the poster for a vintage release would have looked like… so I ended up watching a bunch of YouTube videos and started up Photoshop. I took the cover of the origin AvP comic for the main art and grabbed a couple of stills of the main characters from IMDB. It’s not perfect, but a fun way to learn some new stuff in Photoshop (and I’ve still got a lot left to learn).
