The new color version of the video of the last living Tasmanian tiger | Technology made it possible to recover images from 1933

The French specialist Samuel Francois Steininger managed to colorize a black and white video taken in 1933 of Benjamin, the last Tasmanian tiger, an animal that lived in captivity at the zoo in Australia.

Samuel and his team have achieved impressive results by combining their painstaking research with cutting-edge technology and artistic sensibility.

The National Sound and Film Archive of Australia (NFSA) published footage of the missing animal a few months ago: a 21-second film shot by David Fleay, in which the animal is seen in a cage at Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart, Tasmania.

The color version of “Tasmania the Wonderland” by Fleay, Modified by the French artist, it features Benjamin, a carnivorous marsupial and the last captive thylacine, pacing up and down while two men look at him and shake his cage.

Process challenges

“To choose the colors, we were able to find many different skins in different museums that have been preserved well in the dark and kept their colors“, says Samuel.

In addition to the original skins kept in museums, Samuel’s team had to rely on sketches and paintings due to the lack of original images or color images that could be used for research.

Written descriptions of thylacine fur gave them a general idea of ​​the hues and tints present in the fur, information they supplemented with recent scientific drawings and 3D renderings of the animal.

“We did everything digitally, combining digital restoration and 2D animation, lighting, Artificial intelligence algorithms for movement and noise, composition and digital classification, ”added the artist. “It took more than 200 hours of work to achieve this result.

End of cash

Benjamin’s death occurred on September 7, 1936, which meant that the end of its species, after the death of another specimen at London Zoo in 1931.

The thylacines or Tasmanian tiger were large, carnivorous marsupials whose appearance resembles a cross between a wolf, a fox, and even a large cat. Usually their movements were stiff and slow and they hunted alone or in pairs, but almost always at night. He was originally from Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea and died in the 20th century.

Their main prey are kangaroos and other marsupials, as well as rodents and small birds. Among the main causes of their extinction is the competition they had with dingoes, but also the hunting of humans.