Kinemacolor
Encyclopedia : K : KI : KIN : Kinemacolor
Kinemacolor was the first successful color motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914. It was developed by George Albert Smith of Brighton, England, for the Urban Trading Co., London, in 1906. It was a two-color additive process, photographing and projecting a black and white film behind alternating red and green filters.
"How to Make and Operate Moving Pictures" published by Funk and Wagnalls in 1917 notes the following:
- :OF the many attempts to produce cinematograph pictures... the greatest amount of attention so far has been attracted by a system invented by G. A. Smith, and commercially developed by Charles Urban under the name of "Kinemacolor." In this system (to quote from "Cassell's Cyclopædia of Photography," edited by the editor of this present book), only two colour filters are used in taking the negatives and only two in projecting the positives. The camera resembles the ordinary cinematographic camera except that it runs at twice the speed, taking thirty-two images per second instead of sixteen, and it is fitted with a rotating colour filter in addition to the ordinary shutter. This filter is an aluminium skeleton wheel... having four segments, two open ones, G and H; one filled in with red-dyed gelatine, E F; and the fourth containing green-dyed gelatine, A B. The camera is so geared that exposures are made alternately through the red gelatine and the green gelatine. Panchromatic film is used, and the negative is printed from in the ordinary way, and it will be understood that there is no colour in the film itself.
The first motion picture exhibited in Kinemacolor was an eight-minute short filmed in Brighton titled A Visit to the Seaside, which was trade shown in September 1908. The general public first saw Kinemacolor in a program of twenty-one short films shown at the Palace Theatre in London on February 26, 1909. Checkmated, the first dramatic film made in Kinemacolor, followed in 1910. The documentary The Durbar at Delhi (1912) and the drama The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1914) were the first feature-length color motion pictures.
Kinemacolor projectors were eventually installed in some 300 cinemas in Britain, and 54 dramatic films were produced. Four dramatic short films were also produced in Kinemacolor in the United States in 1912-1913. The company was never a success, and became most notable for its Hollywood studio being taken over by D.W. Griffith, who also took over Kinemacolor's failed plans to film Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, which eventually became The Birth of a Nation.
External links
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.