Hand-colorized Munsters credit-roll

Zach Smothers hand-colored all 1,300 frames from the opening credit roll of The Munsters, doing a beautiful job that balances the palette of the later color episodes and the classic EC/Haunted Mansion horror-colors.


He was inspired by this hand-colorized Addams Family credit roll.

I spent a day or two thinking of how I was going to approach colorizing hundreds upon hundreds of individual images and I finally streamlined a process. After importing all 1,317 frames of the 44-second opening, I broke them down into scenes. Each scene consists of an establishing shot of the character, followed by a quick zoom into a closeup. The establishing shots and close ups would be easy enough, but the zooms seemed like a challenge when coloring frame by frame. Using the same color palette for both parts of the shot did not work well, so I had to color each section (establishing and close-up) separately and find a way to transition the colors during the zoom.

BRINGING THE MUNSTERS BACK FROM THE GRAVE

[Pop Colorture]