More than 100 people gathered at the Waco Hippodrome Friday night to see a special screening of Donnie Darko. To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the cult classic was shown at Waco Indie with a brand-new color technology.
“The film can be adapted to show our new technology and that’s what you’re going to see tonight,” cinematographer Steven Poster said.
Now, he works with the Waco-based 6P Color Inc. to change the way movie-goers see color on the big screen.
“All television monitors in theaters are made up of three colors: red, green and blue,” he explained.
But that’s not how we see the real world, Poster explained. To make up those missing colors, current displays mix red, green and blue together. That means only about 45% of the colors we can see are shown on screens right now.
“Astronauts go into space. They take their camera, they photograph it and they come back and they look at the film and they say, these aren’t the colors we saw,” Poster said.
The solution is a multi-spectral display. 6P Color, in partnership with Baylor University, has developed that color technology.
“Now, we’re going to be able to show them what they saw,” he said.
The new technology, Full Color Range, adds three new primaries to the old RGB formula: cyan, emerald, and yellow.
“With our system, we’re up to 95%,” Poster said. “And that creates an emotional difference that can’t be created any other way.”
Dr. Corey Carbonara is a 6P board member and one of the Baylor researchers involved in the project. He says the addition of the new primary colors shows images closer to how the average person sees them in real life.
“We can make any display better, even existing displays in our pockets,” Carbonara explained. “Now it’s up to the manufacturers to decide whether or not they want to employ that.”
6P Color Inc. is still in the public demonstration stage of its new technology, showing Full Range Color at trade shows and with special screenings like the one at Waco Indie.
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