Page 18 - CinemaRecord #11R.pdf

From Hand Painting To The Technicolor Process by Ken Tulloch

Before the turn of the century, the French firm of Pathe Freres had evolved a method of hand stencilling color
onto short films, but this was an exhausting occupation for the hundreds of young women who did it with
magnifying glasses and camel hair brushes. Although the color was very good, it was not natural. The only way
to do this had been discovered as far back as 1861 by Scottish physicist James Maxwell, who proved that all
colors were made up of a combination of three primaries- red, blue, and green, so by using colored filters in
front of the camera and projector, black and white photographs could be made to appear to be in color.

Early experiments were hampered by the mechanical limitations in trying to get the three separate but
simultaneous black and white filtered images that could then have color added to them, by being projected
through the appropriate filters.

In 1909, the British process called Kinemacolor was the first commercially successful method of doing this, but
its color was not completely true to life, as it compromised on the primaries by using red-orange and blue-green
combinations, the finished product resulted in poor definition and considerable eyestrain.

In 1912, three graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Herbert Kalmas, Daniel Comstock and
Burton Westcott started an engineering firm in Boston and specialised in Physics and Chemistry and one of the
problems they were asked to solve was how to take the flicker out of motion pictures.

Whilst in the process of trying to solve this problem, they became interested in how to add color to film. The
result of this was the appearance in 1915 of the TECHN !COLOR Motion Picture Company. It was decided that
to be commercially successful, the color in their process would have to be contained on the film itself.

Working with the same two color compromise that Kinemacolor had devised, they began a long and expensive
series of experiments throughout the early and mid twenties, finally devisiing a special camera that used a
prism to break the image down into black and white records of the individual colors. But, more later on how this
was achieved.

Dr Kalmus had success with the two color process until1931, when film producers decided the color was too
garish and stopped using it. The little team went flat out to bring in the third color. They designed a new camera
that would take three strips of film through it, the third color being the all important blue component. Merian
Cooper of R.K.O. could see the possibilities of the new process and invested heavily in the company and he
persuaded them to join forces and form a company called Pioneer Pictures to make and market feature films
in the new process.

The first color production by the company was a short called La Cucaracha in 1934, then came two feature
films, Becky Sharp and the Dancing Pirate. Paramount made the first outdoor color film in the new process
called The Trail of The Lonesome Pine in 1936.

Walt Disney made the first color cartoon, The Three Little Pigs. The way in which the three color process
worked was that the camera exposed three strips of black and white film simultaneously, using a patented
beam splitting prism to direct the image to the proper film emulsion.

The red and blue images were recorded on a bi-pack (two negatives sandwiched together) travelling at right
angles to the lens, the red being recorded on the front emulsion, while the blue was passed through to the rear
emulsion. The green went straight through the lens and the prism and was recorded in the normal manner. In
processing the black and white negatives, they were separated and printing matrices made from them. These
were dyed complementary colors of yellow (for the blue record), cyan (for the red record) and magenta (for the
green record).

Each of these separate complementary color images were printed one on top of the other onto a single strip of
blank film that accepted the separate dyes, the combination of which resulted in a full color picture. This
method of printing gave the Technicolor process a range and latitude that was never achieved by any other
process. The dye process was unique to Technicolor (see back page).

It wasn't until the early 1950's that Kodak came up with Eastman color, which only required one strip of film to
be placed in the camera, as the three strips of emulsion were on the one piece of film, but separated by a layer
of gelatine between each. When processed. the gelatine would be washed away and the dyes added.