#ROMANOVS100: RT ANNOUNCES SOCIAL MEDIA COLORIZATION CONTEST WITH RENOWNED BRAZILIAN ARTIST

MOSCOW, MAY 18, 2018 –As part of its ambitious multimedia project #Romanovs100, RT has launched a digital colorization contest of historical photos, open to social media users. The contest will be judged by renowned Brazilian artist and professional colorist Marina Amaral, whose renditions of historical photos have been covered by the BBC, The Verge, the Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mirror, among other international outlets.

Social media users are invited to colorize three archival photographs taken by the Romanov family, specially selected for the contest by Marina Amaral. Once finished, the photos should be posted on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook using the hashtag #Romanovs100. Marina Amaral will personally choose the winner, who will receive two limited edition books: ‘#1917LIVE – The Russian Revolution in Tweets’ (the result of the RT project of the same name, dedicated to the Russian Revolution of 1917), and a book by Marina Amaral and British writer and historian Dan Jones called ‘The Colour of Time: A New History of the World, 1850-1960,’ which contains around 200 historical photographs colorized by Amaral.

You can download the photos in high resolution here. The results of the contest will be announced in early July.

In April 2018, the same team behind #1917LIVE launched #Romanovs100 to bring the story of Russia’s last royal family to life through thousands of Romanov family photographs, which were recently unearthed from within the national archives. The large-scale, cross-platform multimedia project takes place across four platforms – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – in order to retell the last decades of imperial Russia over the 100 days leading up to the centenary of the family’s execution on July 17.

RT’s #1917LIVE project is one of the biggest-ever historical re-enactments on Twitter. Dozens of Twitter accounts were set up as key historical characters of the period, from the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin to common workers and soldiers, tweeting events from 100 years ago in real-time. Historians from the US and UK took part in the project, as well as the world-renowned Brazilian author Paulo Coelho. The project received 20 Russian and international awards, including the 2018 Webby People’s Voice Award. At the Shorty Social Good Awards, the project won for ‘Best in Education’ and won gold for ‘Best Overall Twitter Presence.’