An old black-and-white video of a Tasmanian tiger has been colorized to bring some life back to this decades-long extinct species, the Australian archives agency revealed on Tuesday. The wolf-like thylacine, nicknamed the Tasmanian tiger because of its striped fur, lived in Australia and on the island of New Guinea before becoming extinct about 85 years ago. Today, only a dozen video sequences, silent and in black and white, remain of this furtive beast, which, put end to end, represent three minutes of images. The National film and sound archive of Australia announced that it had colorized the longest of these music videos, an 80-second film of the last known Tasmanian tiger, called Benjamin, who lived in captivity in the 1930s.The footage was shot by David Fleay in December 1933 in the since-closed Beaumaris Zoo in the city of Hobart, where the naturalist was reportedly bitten on the rear while filming.
The government agency had entrusted the images to Samuel François-Steininger, of Composite Films, based in Paris, who carried out a meticulous colorization requiring more than 200 hours of work. The sequence was "astonishing" for its age, but "very difficult to color because, apart from the animal, there was little element in the frame," explained Mr. François-Steininger on the service's website. 'archives. “Due to the resolution and image quality, there was a lot of detail, the fur was dense, and you had to detail and animate a lot of the hairs,” he added.
The clip shows the carnivorous marsupial spinning around in its enclosure, lying down, sniffing and scratching, large dark bands lining its sandy-colored coat. The colorized video was unveiled on Tuesday on National Endangered Species Day, which is held annually in Australia on September 7, the anniversary of Benjamin's death, in 1936.