Technicolor
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- For other uses, see Technicolor (physics) or Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
Technicolor is the trademark for a series of color film processes pioneered by Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation (later, Technicolor, Inc.), now a division of Thomson. Technicolor was the second major color film process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color motion picture process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952. Technicolor became known and celebrated for its hyper-realistic, saturated levels of color, and was used commonly for filming musicals (such as The Wizard of Oz and Singin' in the Rain), costume pictures (such as The Adventures of Robin Hood and Joan of Arc), and animated films (such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia).
The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1915 by Dr. Herbert Kalmus, Dr. Daniel Comstock, and mechanic W. Burton Wescott.
About the Technicolor process
Shooting Technicolor footage, 1934-1954
Technicolor's advantage over other early, natural color processes was that it was a subtractive synthesis rather than an additive one. Technicolor films could run on any projector; unlike other additive processes, it could represent colors clearly without any special projection equipment or techniques.The Technicolor Process 4 used colored filters, a beam splitter made from a thinly coated mirror inside a split-cube prism, and three strips of black-and-white film (hence the "three-strip" designation). The beam splitter allowed 1/3 of the light to shine straight through into a green filter and onto a strip of panchromatic black-and-white film, which registered the green part of the image. The other 2/3 of the light, reflected sideways by the mirror, went through a magenta filter to remove green light, exposed a layer of blue-sensitive orthochromatic film and then onto a red-dyed strip of panchromatic stock (the red dye filtering only red light). The "blue" and "red" film were layered into a single "bipack" strip. The "green" film was a separate strip.
To print the film, each colored strip had a print struck from it onto a light sensitive piece of gelatin film. When processed, "dark" portions of the film hardened, and light areas were washed away. The gelatin film strip was then soaked with a dye complementary to the color recorded by the film: cyan for red, magenta for green, and yellow for blue (see also: CMYK color model for a technical discussion of color printing).
A single clear strip of black and white film with the soundtrack pre-printed was first treated with a mordant solution and then brought in contact with each of the three dye-soaked colored strips in turn, building up the complete color image. This process is referred to as "dye imbibition", a technique which was commonly used in conventional offset printing or lithography but which the Technicolor process utilized on film. The final strip of film would have the dyes soaked into its emulsion and not simply printed onto its surface. The end result was a bright and clear representation of natural color.
Early in the process, the clear film would be pre-exposed with a 50% density black-and-white positive image derived from the green matrix. This process was used largely to cover up fringing in the early days of three-strip printing, and to print framelines that would be otherwise white. Because the layer was of neutral density, the contrast in the picture was lowered. By the late 1930s, however, Technicolor streamlined the process to make up for these shortcomings and this practice ceased.
The color control that was available in the Technicolor process was even available to cinematographers, and many actors and actresses can recall standing on the set for long periods holding a board of colored squares (known as "The Lily") while the camera technicians balanced the colors in the camera. Conversely, cinematographers using monopack stocks such as Eastman and Ansco were at the mercy of the color balance of the negative stock as supplied. The Eastman company produced two versions of their film stock, one balanced for studio lighting, the other balanced for daylight. Cinematographers did have a large amount of control using colored filters over the camera lens or even the lighting.
History of Technicolor
Two-color Technicolor
Technicolor originally existed in a two-color (red and green) system. In Process 1 (1917), a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two adjacent frames of a single strip of black and white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter. Because two frames were being exposed at the same time, the film had to be photographed and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with two apertures (one with a red filter and the other with a green filter), two lenses, and an adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen. Technicolor itself produced the only movie made in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, primarily to interest motion picture producers and exhibitors in color. The near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment doomed this additive color process.Technicolor became a subtractive color process with Process 2 (1922) (cited by academics originally as "two strip" Technicolor, although the term is erroneously used for Technicolor's first three formats). As before, the special Technicolor camera used a prism beam-splitter to expose simultaneously two adjacent frames of a single strip of black and white film, one behind a green filter and one behind a red filter. The difference came in the creation of the print. The two negatives were processed on two, black and white film stocks of half the base thickness of regular film. The "green" positive was then toned red and the "red" positive was toned green, thereby coloring each positive with their complementaries to the negative. The two strips were then cemented together base to base to create a projection print. The Toll of the Sea debuted on November 26, 1922 as the first general release film to use Technicolor.
The second all-color feature in this process, Wanderer of the Wasteland, was released in 1924. Process 2 was also used for color sequences in such major motion pictures as The Ten Commandments (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and Ben-Hur (1925). Douglas Fairbanks' The Black Pirate (1926), became the third feature to be filmed entirely in Technicolor. Savage Passions (1927) and Faith Of Millions (1927) were the only other silent features to be photographed entirely in Process 2.
Alternatively, Process 2 had problems of its own: the film images on the two cemented matrixes did not share the same plane, sometimes creating a soft focus, depending on the optics of the projector. More destructively, the uneven thickness of the film would cause it to cup irregularly, taking it further out of focus. The presence of the image on both sides of the print would lead to twice the amount of scratches being visible onscreen with normal wear. Regardless, Technicolor reigned supreme in Hollywood and was ready for replacement footage for any theater. Prints would buckle as the strip of celluloid nearest the light would contract from the heat, and a great amount of light was needed to project an early Technicolor film. Technicolor had to print up replacement reels that were constantly being shipped between its Boston, Massachusetts plant and exhibitors, with the buckled prints being ironed out by Technicolor employees before being shipped back on the exhibition circuit.
In 1928, Technicolor bought Kelley Color and its patents, including the gelatin imbibition Handschiegl Color Process, which had been purchased by Kelley two years earlier.
Utilizing Handschiegel's technique, Technicolor Process 3 (1928) was developed to eliminate the projection print made double-cemented prints, in favor of a print created by a process similar to rotogravure or lithography called dye-imbibition. The Technicolor camera for Process 3 was identical to that for Process 2, simultaneously photographing two adjacent frames of black and white film behind red and green filters. Every other frame of the camera negative was printed onto one strip of blank film (or "matrix") to create a red record, and the remaining frames were printed onto a second strip of blank film to create a green record. These matrices were coated with a gelatin that hardened in relation to the amount of light that struck it from the negative. The softer gelatin was then washed off the matrix, leaving a relief image created by the hardened gelatin. The matrices were floated in dye baths of complementary colors — the strip containing the red record was dyed green, and the strip containing the green record was dyed red — in which the gelatin would absorb the dye. The thicker the gelatin, the more dye it absorbed. The matrices were then placed in contact with a third, blank strip of film (coated with a substance to absorb dye), and the dye was transferred from the matrices to the new print.
Because the dye transfer process used stable aniline dyes, a Technicolor print from the dye transfer era would retain its original colors virtually unchanged for decades, whereas an Eastmancolor print from the 1950s or 1960s using less stable photochemical dyes would suffer color shift so drastically after as little as ten years that sometimes only the magenta record would remain in the image.
Notable features made entirely in the Technicolor Process 3 include The Viking (1928), Redskin (1929), The Mysterious Island (1929), The Cavalier (1928), On with the Show (1929) (the first all-talking color feature), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), The Show of Shows (1929), Sally (1929),The Vagabond King (1930), Follow Thru (1930), Bright Lights (1930), Golden Dawn (1930), Hold Everything (1930), The Rogue Song (1930), Song of the Flame (1930), Song of the West (1930), Life of the Party (1930), Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1930), Under A Texas Moon (1930), The Bride of the Regiment (1930), Mamba (1930), Whoopee! (1930), The King of Jazz (1930), Under a Texas Moon (1930), Viennese Nights (1931), 'Woman Hungry (1931), Kiss Me Again (1931), 'Fifty Million Frenchmen (1931), The Runaround (1931), Fanny Foley Herself (1931), Manhattan Parade (1932), Doctor X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), (1934) and Kliou the Tiger (1935). In addition, scores of features were released with Technicolor sequences. Numerous short subjects were also photographed in Technicolor Process 3, including the first color sound cartoons by producers such as Ub Iwerks and Walter Lantz. Song of the Flame (1930) became the first color movie to use a widescreen process (using a system known as the Vitascope which used 65mm film).
Very few of the original camera negatives and matrices survive of movies made in Technicolor Process 2 or 3. In the late 1940s, most were discarded from storage at Technicolor in a space-clearing move, after the studios declined to reclaim the materials.
Warner Bros., which had vaulted from an extremely minor exhibitor to a major studio by its introduction of the talkies, latched onto Technicolor as the next big thing. Other producers followed the Warner Bros. example by making features in color, with either Technicolor or one of its competitors, such as Brewster Color and Multicolor (later Cinecolor). However, the aspect of color did not increase the number of audiences to the point where it was economical. This, and the Great Depression severely strained movie studios' finances, and spelled the end of the first Technicolor boom.
Three-strip Technicolor
Development and introduction
Kalmus convinced Walt Disney to shoot one of his Silly Symphony cartoons Flowers and Trees (1932) in Process 4, the new "three-strip" process. Seeing the potential in full-color Technicolor, Walt Disney negotiated a two-year exclusive contract for the use of the process. Competitors such as the Fleischer Studios and the Ub Iwerks studio were shut out; they had to settle for either the two-color Technicolor systems or use a competing process such as Cinecolor.
Flowers and Trees was a success with audiences and critics alike, and won the first Academy Award for Animated Short Film. The next Silly Symphonies to be shot with the process, Three Little Pigs, engendered such a positive audience response that it overshadowed the features it played with. Hollywood was buzzing about color film again. According to Fortune magazine, "Merian Caldwell Cooper, producer for RKO-Radio Pictures, saw one of the Silly Symphonies and said he never wanted to make a black and white picture again."
Although Disney's earliest Technicolor cartoons utilized the general three-strip camera, an improved process was soon developed solely for cartoon work: the camera would contain one strip of black and white negative film, and each animation cell would be photographed three times, on three sequential frames, behind alternating red, green, and blue filters. Three separate dye transfer printing matrixes would be created from the red, green, and blue records in their respective additive colors, cyan, magenta and yellow.
Convincing Hollywood
The studios were willing to adopt three-color Technicolor for live-action feature production, if it could be proved viable. Shooting three-strip Technicolor required very bright lighting, as the film had an extremely slow speed of ASA 5. That, and the bulk of the cameras and a lack of experience with three-color cinematography, equated to skepticism in the studio board rooms.Fortune magazine's October 1934 article stressed that Technicolor, as a corporation, was rather remarkable in that it kept its investors quite happy despite the fact that it had only been in profit twice in all of the years of its existence, during the early boom at the turn of the decade. A well-managed company, half of whose stock was controlled by a clique loyal to Kalmus, Technicolor never had to cede any control to its bankers or unfriendly stockholders. In the mid-'30s, all the major studios except MGM were in the financial doldrums, and a color process that truly reproduced the visual spectrum was seen as a possible shot-in-the-arm for the ailing industry.
Live-action use of three-strip Technicolor was first seen in a musical number of the M-G-M feature The Cat and the Fiddle (1934). A few months later, Pioneer Pictures, a movie company formed by Technicolor investors, produced the first short film shot in Technicolor's three-strip process, La Cucaracha (1934), a two-reel musical comedy that cost $65,000, approximately four times what an equivalent black-and-white two-reeler would cost. Released by RKO Radio Pictures, the short was a success in introducing the new Technicolor as a viable medium for live-action films. The three-strip process also was used in some short sequences filmed for several movies made during 1934, including the final sequence of The House of Rothschild (1934). Pioneer/RKO's Becky Sharp (1935) became first feature-length motion picture photographed entirely in three-strip Technicolor. The spectacular success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), which became the top-grossing film of 1938, caused the studios to sit up and take notice.
Problems and difficulties
One major drawback of Technicolor's 3-strip process was that it required a special Technicolor camera. Film studios could not purchase Technicolor cameras, only rent them for their productions, complete with a number of camera technicians and a "color supervisor" to make sure sets, costumes and make-up took full advantage of any limitations imposed by the system. More often than not on many early productions, the supervisor was Natalie Kalmus, ex-wife of Herbert Kalmus and part owner in the company.The process of splitting the image reduced the amount of light that reached the film stock. Since the film speed of the stocks used in the camera were fairly slow, early Technicolor productions required an additional amount of lighting than a black and white production. It is reported that temperatures on the film set of The Wizard of Oz frequently exceeded 100 °F (38 °C), and as a result some of the more heavily costumed characters required a large water intake to replace loss by perspiration. Some actors and actresses claimed to have suffered permanent eye damage from the high levels of illumination.
Because of the added lighting and triple amount of film necessary, Technicolor's productions demanded a high budget film for its usage.
The introduction of Eastman color and decline
Color film processes that recorded all three primary colors on one strip of camera film had been developed for amateur film gauges (16 mm and 8 mm) in the 1930s by Agfa in Germany and Eastman Kodak in the United States. Technicolor introduced Monopack, a single-strip color reversal film (actually a 35 mm version of Kodachrome) in 1941 for specialized uses on location where the bulky three-strip camera would be impractical. But the higher grain of the image made it unsuitable for studio work.Eastman Kodak introduced its first 35 mm color negative film in 1950, and then in 1952 an improved version of a quality suitable for Hollywood production. This change meant that Technicolor prints could be struck from a single camera negative exposed in a standard camera. Foxfire (1955), filmed in 1954, was the last American-made feature photographed with a Technicolor three-strip camera.
In 1953, Eastman Kodak also introduced a high-quality color print film, allowing studios to produce prints through standard photographic processes as opposed to having to send them to Technicolor for the expensive dye imbibition process. That same year, the Technicolor lab adapted its dye transfer process to derive matrices and imbibition prints directly from Eastmancolor negatives. In the case of post-1953 Technicolor movies, the dye transfer release prints never faded, whereas the in color negatives from which they were derived, the cyan record faded in as little as five years.
In 1954, Technicolor made reduction dye transfer prints of the large format VistaVision negative. Their process was also adapted for use with Todd-AO, Ultra Panavision 70 and Technirama formats. All of them were an improvement over the three-strip negatives since the negative print-downs generated sharper and finer grain dye transfer copies.
Technicolor eventually fell out of favor in the United States as being too expensive. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the number of release copies were smaller than they had been in the past. Dye transfer printing was only cost effective in large runs when the cost of the matrixes was amortized. However, the superior image quality was still favored by some directors and cinematographers. The last new American film released in Technicolor dye transfer prints was The Godfather, Part II (1974).
In 1975, the US dye transfer plant was closed. In 1977, the final dye-transfer printer left in Rome was used by Dario Argento to film his horror film Suspiria. After the film was completed, the machine was dismantled and sold to China. In 1978, the British line was shut down and sold to Beijing Film and Video Lab in China. A great many films from China and Hong Kong have since been made in the Technicolor dye transfer process including Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou and even one American film, Space Avenger (1989, director: Richard W. Haines). The Beijing line was shut down in 1993.
The Technicolor Corporation in the modern era
The Technicolor company remained a highly successful film processing firm and later became involved in video and audio duplication (CD, VHS and DVD manufacturing) and digital video processes. Technicolor, Inc. acquired the film processing company Consolidated Film Industries in 2000.Technicolor was purchased by French company Thomson in 2001, which discontinued the dye-transfer process the next year.
Film restorations
By the late 1990s the dye transfer process still had its advantages. Its distinctive "Technicolor look" was hard to obtain by any other means, and it remained the most archivally stable color process. In fact whereas many earlier Eastmancolor movies have almost completely faded (leaving only the magenta record), Technicolor movies have retained their color practically unchanged. Dye-transfer prints use non-fading aniline dyes. Furthermore, Technicolor's negatives before 1954 were all on black and white stock, which does not alter over the course of time. This has become of importance in recent years with the large market for films transferred to video formats for home viewing. The best color quality control for video transfer by far is achieved by printing from Technicolor negatives (or black and white color separations) onto low-contrast Eastman Kodak stock.In 1997, Technicolor reintroduced the dye transfer process to film production. It was used on the restorations of films such as The Wizard of Oz, Rear Window, Funny Girl, and Apocalypse Now Redux. An article on the restoration of (original version, 1977) claimed that a rare dye-transfer print of the movie, made for director George Lucas at the British Technicolor lab, had been used as a color reference for the restoration. The article claimed that conventional color prints of the movie had all degraded over the years to the extent that no two had the same color balance. However, because of the variation in color balance per print, dye-transfer prints are used in the professional restoration world as only a rough guideline.
Reintroduction of the dye transfer process
After its reintroduction in 1997, the dye transfer process was (somewhat unexpectedly) used in several big-budget, modern Hollywood productions. These included Bulworth, Pearl Harbor, and Toy Story. The distinct "look" this process achieves, often sought after by film makers looking to re-create the period of time at which Technicolor was at its most prominent, is difficult to obtain through other methods and is one explanation for the enduring demand and credibility of the process.While the color was rich and vibrant, there were many quality control problems, including contrast distortion and emulsion flaking in projectors. Technicolor's speed at making prints was also economically unfit — 3000 Eastman prints could be run off in the time that it took to make 30 quality dye-transfer prints. Kodak's rival high-contrast format, VISION, soon won popularity with studios. It offered vibrant colors and rich, deep blacks, and took 1/100th of the time to print and process.
The look of dye transfer film continues to be used in Hollywood, usually in films set in the mid-20th century. Parts of The Aviator, the 2004 biopic of Howard Hughes, were digitally manipulated to imitate color processes that were available during the periods each scene takes place. The two-color look of the film is incorrectly cited as looking like Technicolor's two-color systems, and is in fact a facsimile of Hughes' own color system, Multicolor. The "three-strip" Technicolor look begins after the newsreel footage of Hughes making the first flight around the world.
Modern references
Technicolor's association with color filming is still so embedded in mass consciousness that it has become a term often genericized used to describe:- Many different films and genres (e.g., the "Technicolor Musical") produced while the Technicolor process was at its most prominent.
- Used by many academics as a representative parallel between the escapist optimistic tone of films produced during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
- As slang for anything in bright garish colors.
Further reading
- Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor: The Movies' Magic Rainbow. Easton Studio Press, 2005. ISBN 0964706504
- Richard W. Haines, Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing. McFarland & Company, 2003. ISBN 0786418095
- Paul Read. "A Short History of Cinema Film Post-Production (1896 — 2006)," in English, in: Joachim Polzer (editor). Zur Geschichte des Filmkopierwerks. (On Film Lab History). Weltwunder der Kinematographie. Beiträge zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Filmtechnik. Volume 8.2006. April 2006. 336 pages. (available through amazon.de) — ISBN 3-934535-26-7
See also
External links
- [Technicolor official site]
- [Kulturblog: Technicolor, An Explanation]
- [Technicolor History at the American WideScreen Museum]
- [Thomson Corporate Website]
- [Listing of All Technicolor Features to 1935]
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