One of the questions I got when I showed the Charlie Brown Career Education Filmstrips at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con was “why did they make Franklin so dark? He’s hard to see!
My answer was…. they didn’t. When I digitized the filmstrips that I showed, I used a slide scanner that I had, and did the best I could to run the filmstrip through it. A combination of the low grade of the image generator in the slide scanner and the awkward way I got the filmstrip through meant that I ended up with a fairly dark image, and even attempt image adjustments afterwards did not rescue the dark areas.
The good news is that I now have a better scanning device. It’s not perfect – this time, the problem is that areas are a bit too bright and wash the lighter colors out – but it should be getting me closer to the intended color, as well as giving me higher resolution. So perhaps I will scan and prepare other filmstrips for some future event. Given the intentional diversity of skin tone in this film strip series (with the inclusion of Franklin and the introduction of Latina character Dolores), I really want to get as close as possible to accurate reproduction.
