More recent investigation has inquired into the functioning of other social demographics in film narrative. Prominent amongst these other demographics is the category of race, referred to here as «melanation». «Melanation» here refers to the amount of melanin pigmentation present in a person’s skin. This term is used because it is a physiological description, unburdened by the socio-psychological meanings of the word «race», or the colour adjectives commonly used to describe the various members of the category. Findings support the notion that contemporary moving images narrative discriminates systematically against individuals on the basis of the melanin content in their skin, with discrimination taking place at the level of narrative content, access to means, and the functioning of technology, whose interaction causes cause different marginalizations of different demographic populations.

Time online of July 24 2020 observes that, «Technologies, such as photographic film, sometimes capture the issues and beliefs and values of the times.»^[3]  The article goes on to discuss an inbuilt anti-melanin bias in much contemporary image capturing technology, whose result is that highly melanated people are often distorted and rendered unrecognizable or all but invisible. A well known example of this bias is this February 13, 2022 tweet posted by Prince Akamura,^[4] an American American football player who is a United States citizen of Nigerian heritage. The technology used to take the photograph erased Prince Akamura as a subject, leaving only the two lesser melanated men he is with as prominent, visible subjects of this visual narrative. While the subject of the Akamura tweet is a still photograph, the Times article also refers to digital technology’s inability to follow a melanated form.

 
Although colonial France and England, the biggest colonizers of highly melanated people, administered the practice of moving images narrative differently in their African colonies, there were similarities. In the French colonies, Africans were explicitly forbidden by the Laval Decree of 1934 from making films in Africa (Cassis 2010^[5], Ugor 2007^[6]). In British colonies, a system of censorship stifled attempts by Africans to engage in film practice (Ugor ibid). Attainment of independence in the 1950s and 1960s by the majority of African countries liberated melanated people on the African continent legally to represent themselves in moving images and to engage, as melanated people in the Americas also engaged, with the inadequacy of the technology for their representation.  
 
The 1960s were a critical period in the African-American civil rights struggle.
Desegregation policies, including bussing of melanated children to school in neighborhoods inhabited by lesser-melanated people, that had been initiated in the previous decade were consolidated. African-American mothers in recently integrated schools began to complain about the way their children appeared in school photographs, especially in juxtaposition to lesser-melanated schoolmates. Kodak, the market leader in still and moving images photographic stock at the time, did not pay attention to such complaints until manufacturers of dark-hued commodities such as chocolate and wooden furniture also complained of the narrow dynamic range available. It was only then, in response to the need to photograph commodities rather than human beings more reliably that film stock capable of obtaining definition of darker content was developed.