The history and science of colour film

In the early days of film production，Hand Tinting was a widely practiced technique of painting colors onto the film itself. The first hand tinted movie, Annabelle Serpentine Dance, was filmed in Edison's Black Maria Studios. Annabelle Moore, a young dancer from Broadway, is dressed in white veils that appear to change.

As film became an international mass media industry, even stencils could not meet the demands of production. Filmmakers began using bath processes to tint and tone their films. Tinting involved putting the film in a bath of dye – this would turn the entire frame a particular color. Toning on the other hand only colored the dark parts of the frame by chemically converting the silver in the film to colored silver salts.

The first major venture into capturing color naturally in motion picture came in 1908 with Charles Urban and the Natural Color Kinematograph Company. The Kinemacolor system, invented by George Albert Smith was a sequential two color additive process.

 

KINEMACOLOR CAMERA

In the camera, one frame would be captured with a red filter and the next frame with a green filter and back and forth. When played back with a projector with a red green filter fly wheel, the red and green sequential images would “add” together because of our persistence of vision. The result was a surprising good color image despite being only a two color system.

In the 1990s, many filmmakers explored different lab processes such as bleach bypass to create unique film tones. Moving into the 2000s, computers had become powerful enough to handle entire films. Digital intermediaries came into use – a process of scanning a film frame by frame into a computer to be digitally manipulated.

The first film to get the digital intermediary treatment for the entire film was The Coen Brother’s O Brother Where Art Thou – in 2001. Cinematographer Roger Deakins worked for 11 weeks toning down the lush green summer foliage to achieve a dusty golden desaturated look.

Reference:

The History and Science of Color Film: From Isaac Newton to the Coen Brothers | FilmmakerIQ.com. 2013. The History and Science of Color Film: From Isaac Newton to the Coen Brothers | FilmmakerIQ.com. [ONLINE] Available at: http://filmmakeriq.com/lessons/the-history-and-science-of-color-film-from-isaac-newton-to-the-coen-brothers/. [Accessed 08 September 2013].