No Film School: If you start studying film history, you're going to get lists of companies and processes that created the industry we know and love today.
One of those processes is Technicolor. Well, it's technically upwards of five different processes, but we'll get to that. So, what does that even mean? And what was its impact on early Hollywood?
There's a whole lot to unpack.
4 comments:
Color video is one of those things that seems like a given, yeah of course that exists, for me, and then every once in a while I step back and realize how bat shit it is that black and white video cameras exist, let alone colored ones! I had no idea that there was a version of technicolor with only red and green, when it feels like if you're missing a whole primary color it would extremely limit the output colors. I’m really interested in where color technology is going to go in the future, and if one day movies will all be three dimensional hologram displays of reality, and my grandchildren will look back at technicolor movies and think we all lived in a two dimensional world, the same way I look back at old black and white movies and wonder if the entire past was black and white.
I am not embarrassed to admit that while my knowledge of films is vast, my knowledge of what goes into them is much more limited. I have heard the term “Technicolor” throughout my life and know that it refers to a film corporation from the early 1900’s but I have never investigated further. Technicolor cornered the market in Hollywood and set the standards for color in movies by characterizing them with increased luminosity and bold colors. The article offered a brief fly over of the 5 processes of making color films. Process 1 was an additive system using a prism to expose to separate films at the same time, one green and one red which were then projected together to create one color image. Processes 2 and 3 were subtractive systems, 2 used red and green negatives and were printed on a single film strip. 3 was a refinement of process 2 that chemically dyed the two images onto a single strip of film. Process 4 is the most famous and successful technicolor process, it used a 3 beam splitter technique capturing red, green and blue films which were combined into a single color image. Process 5 created prints from Eastmancolor negatives which offered a cheaper solution. In the end, reading this article was a good knowledge base and I enjoyed learning more about technicolor.
I’ve never developed color film, but I develop all my black and white film and I am familiar with the color film process. I find the chemistry behind film processing super interesting. These multi-strip processes are not how it's done with photographic film. I wonder if it uses the same chemicals and developing process as the film I’m used to. With photo film, it's all on one strip, but it's in three layers. It's also subtractive coloring, and the splitting of the three colors comes in when printing. When you load the enlarger, you control the intensity of each color filter. I don’t know if it’s always been that way or if this is a modern way to make color film. It makes sense that for longer processes and long films, it's easier to just split the 3 colors up initially, and then overlay them when playing the film, as opposed to needing 3 different light bulbs or filters to play one film. Overall I think the technicolor process is super cool and I’d totally try it if the opportunity ever presented itself.
I understand how rgb is connected to cmy now from that which I hadn’t fully grasped before. The attached video talked about the process of turning negatives into positives so that they would soak up the anti-color and when added together would create these rich pictures and it is so amazing. That the pairs of red and cyan, green and magenta, yellow and blue are the opposites of each other, the anti-color as the video was describing. I had no idea that there was a two strip Technicolor process for movies before The Wizard of Oz. I also find it fun that blue was the last color to be added to movies similar to how it was the last LED to be created, and one of the last major colors to be named. It was also fun to see that one of the first three strip technicolor movie was a Robin Hood movie, whenever theres a new technology for movies, theres a Robin Hood soon to follow.
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