Technicolor
Technicolor is a color film process invented in 1916 and then improved over several decades. It is the second major process of its kind, after the British Kinemacolor, and the most widely used in Hollywood between 1922 and 1952. Technicolor was known and recognized for its saturated level of color, and was most commonly used for filming musicals such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Singing in the Rain (1952), period films such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), or animation such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) or Fantasy (1940). However, it was also used for less spectacular comedies and dramas, and sometimes even in film noir, as in May Heaven Judge (1945) or Niagara (1953).).
"Technicolor" is the trademark for a series of color film processes developed by the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation (a subsidiary of Technicolor, Inc), now part of the new Technicolor company, formerly Thomson. The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston in 1914, and its founders were Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott. The particle "Tech" of the name was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Kalmus graduated and later became an instructor. Technicolor, Inc was incorporated in Delaware in 1921.
History
Two-color Technicolor
Process 1
Originally Technicolor was created as a two-color system (red and green). In Process 1, a prism behind the camera lens exposed two consecutive frames on a single black-and-white negative, one frame under a red filter, the other under a green filter. Since the two frames were exposed at the same time, the film had to be shot and played at twice the speed. The exhibit required a special projector with two apertures, one behind a red filter and one behind a green filter, two lenses, and an adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen. The results were first made public to the American Institute of of Mining Engineers in New York on February 21, 1917. Technicolor itself produced the only film shot in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had limited distribution in cities in the eastern United States. States, beginning with Boston and New York in September 1917, primarily to interest film producers and exhibitors in color. The almost constant need for a technician to adjust projection alignment doomed this additive color process. Only a few fragments of The Gulf Between survive today, showing the star Grace Darmond.
Process 2
Convinced that additive color processes had no future, Kalmus turned his attention to subtractive color processes, culminating in what would become known as Process 2 (1922) (sometimes confusingly called "of two strips"). As before, Technicolor's special camera used a light splitter that simultaneously exposed two frames of a single strip of black-and-white film, one behind a green filter and the other behind a red filter.
The difference was that the two-component negative was now used to produce subtractive color film. Since the colors were physically present in the print, no special projection equipment was required, and the correct display of the two images did not depend on the skill of the projectionist.
The exposed frames behind the green filter were printed on black and white film, and the frames behind the red filter were printed on another film. After development, each film was chemically colored by applying a complementary color to the corresponding filter, red tint for green filtered images, and green tint for red filtered images. Unlike tint, which adds a uniform veil of color to the entire image, chemical color change replaced the silver of the black-and-white image with a translucent colored matter, so that dark areas were strongly colored and tones intermediates were colored proportionally. The two strips, made of less than usual thickness, were then glued on top of each other to create the color projection print. The Toll of the Sea debuted on November 26, 1922 as the first general distribution film to use Technicolor.
The second unabridged color production in this process, Wanderer of the Wasteland, was published in 1924. Process 2 was also used for color sequences in mainstream films such as The Ten Commandments (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Ben-Hur (1925). Douglas Fairbanks's The Black Pirate (1926) became the fourth production filmed entirely in Technicolor.
Although commercially successful, process 2 was plagued with technical problems. Since the images on the two sides of the film were not exactly in the same plane, they could not be perfectly focused at the same time. The significance of this problem depended on the depth of field of the projector optics. More serious was the problem of film bloat. Films in general tended to warp after repeated use. Whenever a film was projected, each frame was heated by the intense light from the projector, causing it to swell slightly. Then it would cool down, and the swelling would subside, but not quite. It was found that glued films were not only very prone to swelling, but the direction of swelling could suddenly and randomly change from back to front or vice versa, so even the most attentive projectionist could not help but that the image would suddenly go out of focus when it changed that direction. Technicolor was then to supply new prints to send the deformed prints to Boston labs to be flattened, after which they could be returned to circulation, at least for a while. The special thickness of the film and the presence of image layers on both surfaces made the prints particularly vulnerable to scratches, and since the scratches were very brightly colored, they were a great nuisance. Cutting a film print in Process 2 without special attention to its unusually laminated construction often ended in a bad cut that got stuck in the projector. Even before these problems were discovered, it was clear to Technicolor that the glued film idea was only a stopgap solution, and they were already working to develop an improved process.
Process 3
Based on the same ink transfer technique first applied to films by Max Handschiegl in 1916, Technicolor Process 3 was developed in 1928 to eliminate the projection print based on two glued films and replace it with one print created by embedded ink. The Technicolor camera in process 3 was identical to that in process 2 throughout, photographing two consecutive frames on the same black-and-white film behind red and green filters.
In the lab, frames from the red filter were printed on a specially prepared gelatin film (called "matrix film") to create a red film, and the rest of the frames were printed on a second film. similar film strip to create a green footage. When exposed to ultraviolet light where necessary, the gelatin hardened in those areas. Areas not exposed to light were washed away, leaving a kind of hardened gelatin relief. The two parent films were dipped in dye baths of their complementary colors. The red recording strip was stained green, and the green strip was stained red. The harder the gelatin was, the more ink it would absorb.
During final printing, the matrices were brought into contact with a strip of emulsified film (known as "blank film") and the ink was transferred from the matrices to the new print. A deacetylated chitin-based mordant applied to the blank film prior to printing prevented the ink from bleeding. As this ink transfer process was introduced at about the same time as the sound-on-film system, the white film emulsion was adapted to film where the black-and-white soundtrack was first printed, and then added ink.
The first film made entirely in Technicolor process 3 was The Viking (1928), which had synchronized music and sound effects. Redskin (1929), with synchronized music, and The Mysterious Island (1929), partly spoken, were shot almost entirely in this process, but also included some blank-and-white sequences. black. The following films were made entirely or nearly entirely in the Technicolor 3 process: On with the Show! (1929) (first 100% color sound film), Gold Diggers of Broadway (1929), The Show of Shows (1929), Sally (1929), The Vagabond King (1930), Follow Thru (1930), Golden Dawn (1930), Hold Everything (1930), The Rogue Song (1930), Song of the Flame (1930), Song of the West (1930), The Life of the Party (1930), Sweet Kitty Bellairs (1930), Bride of the Regiment (1930), Mamba (1930), Whoopee! (1930), King of Jazz (1930), Under a Texas Moon (1930), Bright Lights (1930), Viennese Nights (1930), Woman Hungry (1931), Kiss Me Again (1931) and Fifty Million Frenchmen (1931). In addition, numerous short films were also made in process 3, including the first color sound cartoons by producers such as Ub Iwerks and Walter Lantz. Song of the Flame became the first widescreen color film (using a system called the Vitascope, which used 65mm film).
In 1931, an improvement to Process 3 was developed that removed grain from the film, resulting in brighter, more vivid colors. This process premiered in the Radio Pictures film The Runaround (1931). The new process not only improved color, but also removed specks on the screen that previously blurred and reduced visibility. This new improvement, along with a reduction in cost (from 8.55 cents to 7 cents per foot of film) led to a new resurgence in color. Warner Brothers took the lead by producing three films (out of an initial plan of six): Manhattan Parade (1932), Doctor X (1932) and Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Radio Pictures followed it up by announcing plans to make four more films in the new process. Only one of them, Fanny Foley Herself (1931), was produced. Although Paramount Pictures announced plans to make eight films and Metro Goldwyn Mayer promised two color films, none of them materialized. This is due to the lukewarm public reception of new color films. Two more independent films would be made in this enhanced process, Legong: Dance of the Virgins (1934) and Kliou the Tiger (1935).
Very few of the original Technicolor negatives from this era have survived. In the late 1940s, most were purged from the Technicolor warehouse archives to make room, after the studios refused to claim the material. The original Technicolor prints that survived into the 1950s were often used to make black-and-white prints for television and then simply thrown away. This explains why so many early color films survive today only in black and white.
Warner Bros., which had gone from minor exhibitor to major studio by introducing talkies, incorporated Technicolor printing to enhance its films. Other producers followed Warner Bros.'s lead by making color films, either with Technicolor or with one of its competitors, such as Brewster Color and Multicolor (later Cinecolor). However, the introduction of color did not improve viewership figures to make it profitable. This and the Great Depression severely damaged studio finances, and marked the end of Technicolor's first financial success.
Three Strip Technicolor
Process 4: Development and introduction
As early as 1924, Technicolor had a full-color process in mind, and by 1929 the company was actively working to develop that process. Hollywood had made so much use of Technicolor between 1929 and 1930 that many thought the movie industry would soon switch to producing exclusively in color. By 1931, the Great Depression hit the movie industry, which began to make economic adjustments. Production in color had been drastically reduced by 1932, when Burton Westcott and Joseph A. Ball completed work on developing a new three-color camera. Technicolor could now promise studios a full range of colors, as opposed to the limited red and green spectrum of previous films. The new camera simultaneously exposed three strips of black and white film. The light that passed through the lens was divided through a prism into two rays of light. One passed through a green filter, which blocked red and blue light and formed an image on a strip of panchromatic (ie, sensitive to the entire light spectrum) film. The other passed through a magenta filter that blocked green light and were printed in a bipack of two films with their emulsified sides pressed together. The front film was sensitive only to blue light and only filmed the blue end of the spectrum. His emulsion had a surface layer of reddish-orange ink that prevented blue light from reaching the panchromatic film just below, thus only recording the red side of the light. The resulting three negatives were used to produce three printing matrices, which in turn were used to print superimposed ink images in cyan, magenta, and yellow onto a single film strip, creating a full-color projection print.
Kalmus convinced Walt Disney to film one of his Silly Symphonies, Trees and Flowers (1932) in process 4, the name given to the new "three strips" process. Seeing the potential of full-color Technicolor, Walt Disney negotiated a contract for exclusive use of the process that would last until September 1935 (when other studios could produce films in the new system, but would not be able to release them until 1936). Competitors such as Fleischer Studios and the Ub Iwerks studio fell behind, having to use two-color Technicolor systems or competing processes such as Cinecolor.
Trees and Flowers was a critical and popular success, winning the first Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. All subsequent Silly Symphonies from 1933 onwards were shot in three colours. One of them, The Three Little Pigs (1933), got such a positive response from the audience that it eclipsed the films with which it was screened. Hollywood again leaned towards color cinema. According to Fortune magazine, "Merian C. Cooper, producer of RKO Radio Pictures and director of King Kong (1933), saw one of the Symphonies silly and said she never wanted to make a black and white movie again".
Although Disney's early 60-odd Technicolor animated shorts used the three-strip camera, a process of "rolling exposure" circa 1937 intended for animation work: The camera would have a strip of black and white negative, and each animation cel would be photographed three times, in three consecutive frames, through alternating red, green, and blue filters (the so-called &# 34;Technicolor Color Wheel"). Thus, three ink transfer matrices were created from the red and blue filming, in their respective complementary colours, cyan, magenta and yellow.
Shooting Technicolor Footage, 1932-1955
The advantages of the Technicolor process over earlier near-natural color processes were that it was a method of subtractive synthesis, rather than additive: unlike the additive Kinemacolor and Chronochrome processes, Technicolor prints did not require a special projection equipment. Unlike the Dufaycolor additive process, the projected image did not have to pass through an obstructive mosaic-based color filter layer. Most importantly, compared to other subtractive systems, Technicolor offered the best balance between high image quality and print speed.
Technicolor's Process 4 chamber contained filters, a light splitter consisting of a partially reflective surface within a cube-shaped splitting prism, and three separate rolls of black-and-white film (hence the name & #34;three strips"). The light splitter allowed a third of the light passing through the lens to pass through the reflector and a green filter, to form the image of one of three strips, which recorded only the green component of the light spectrum. The other two-thirds were reflected down the mirror and passed through a magenta filter, which absorbed the green light and allowed only the red and blue part of the spectrum to pass through. After this filter were the other two film strips, with their respective emulsions pressed into contact. The front film was a red-blind orthochromatic type that recorded only blue light. On the surface of his emulsion was an orange-red coating that prevented blue light from reaching the panchromatic film emulsion behind it, thus recording only the red part of the spectrum.
Each of the three negative results was printed on a special matrix film. After processing, each matrix was a nearly invisible representation of the film frames in the form of gelatin reliefs, thicker (and therefore more absorbent) where each image was darker, and thinner where it was brighter. Each matrix was submerged in an ink of the complementary color to that registered in the corresponding negative: cyan for red, magenta for green and yellow for blue.
A single black-and-white film strip with the soundtrack and frame separator lines that had been printed in advance with an etching solution, and then contacted with each of the ink dies, thus constructing the color image. The gelatin from the gelatin coating was absorbed or imbibed by the receiving film, rather than being deposited on its surface, hence the term "ink embedment". Strictly speaking, this is a mechanical printing process, slightly similar to offset printing or lithography, and not a photographic process, since actual printing does not include a chemical change caused by exposure to light.
In the early days of the process, the receiving film was printed 50% with a black and white image derived from the green film, called key or K (for Key) filming. This process was mainly used to cover the fine edges of the image where colors mixed unrealistically, forming a kind of color banding. This additional black increased the contrast of the final image and hid any fringes. However, the overall coloring suffered as a result. By 1944, Technicolor had improved the process to address those difficulties, and the J filming was dropped.
Convincing Hollywood
Studios were willing to adopt three-color Technicolor for live-image production, if it proved viable. Shooting in three-color Technicolor required very bright lighting, as the film was extremely slow at ASA 5. That, and the size of the cameras and lack of experience with three-color cinematography led to skepticism among film committees. studies.
An article in Fortune magazine in October 1934 said that Technicolor, as a corporation, stood out in the fact that it kept its investors quite happy despite the fact that only two years had been profitable. times in its entire existence, during the first boom at the turn of the decade. As a well-run company, half of whose stock was controlled by Kalmus loyalists, Technicolor never had to cede any control to its bankers or hostile investors. By the mid-1930s, all the major studios except MGM were in financial trouble, and a color process that truly reproduced the entire visual spectrum appeared as a potential shotgun shot at the ailing industry.
In November 1933, Herbert Kalmus of Technicolor and RKO announced plans to produce three-strip Technicolor films in 1934, beginning with Ann Harding starring in a film titled The World Outside.
The use of Technicolor in live action was first seen in a musical number in the MGM film The Cat and the Fiddle, released on February 16, 1934. On July 1, MGM published Hollywood Party, with a Technicolor animation sequence produced by Walt Disney. On July 28 of the same year, Warner Brothers released Service With a Smile, followed by Good Morning, Eve! on August 5, two comedic shorts starring Leon Errol and shot in Technicolor three-strip. Pioneer Pictures, a film company formed by Technicolor investors, produced what is generally credited as the first three-color live-action short film, La Cucaracha, released on August 31, 1934. La Cucaracha is a two-reel musical comedy short film that cost $65,000, roughly four times what a black-and-white film of similar length would have cost. Published by RKO, the medium-length film was successful in introducing the new Technicolor as a viable medium for live-action films. The three-strip process was also used for several short film sequences shot during 1934, including the final sequences of The House of Rothschild, from 20th Century Pictures and United Artists with George Arliss, and Kid Millions (by Samuel Goldwyn Studios) with Eddie Cantor.
Dominican actress who triumphed in Hollywood at Universal Studios Maria Montez was named as La Reina Del Technicolor, she starred in a series of technicolor adventure films that attracted audiences and made it much more popular in Hollywood
The film Becky Sharp (1935) became the first three-strip feature film shot entirely in Technicolor. Initially the Technicolor system could only be used indoors. In 1936, The Way of the Lone Pine became the first production with outdoor sequences, with impressive results. The spectacular success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), released in December 1937 and the highest-grossing film of 1938, attracted studio attention.
Limitations and difficulties
One of the major disadvantages of Technicolor's three-strip process was that it required special, huge, and very heavy cameras. Movie studios couldn't buy Technicolor cameras, only rent them for their productions, along with camera technicians and a "color supervisor" to ensure that the sets, costumes and makeup did not go beyond the limitations of the system. Often on many early productions, the supervisor was Natalie Kalmus, Herbert Kalmus's ex-wife and part owner of the company. The directors had great difficulties with her; Vincente Minelli said, "I couldn't do anything right in the eyes of Mrs. Kalmus."
The process of splitting the image reduced the light reaching the film. As its exposure speed was quite slow, the first Technicolor productions required a greater amount of lighting compared to a black and white production. There is evidence that temperatures on the set of The Wizard of Oz from the studio's hot spotlights used to exceed 38°C, and some of the actors with the most makeup and costumes required large amounts of consuming water. Some actors and actresses claimed permanent eye damage from the high lighting levels. Due to the increased lighting and triple the amount of film required, Technicolor demanded large budgets.
Introduction of Eastmancolor and decadence
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Eastman Kodak had already introduced color films that recorded all three primary colors in three emulsion layers on a single film in the mid-1930s in the United States (Kodachrome for 16mm home movies in 1935, and later for home movies 8 and 35mm in 1936), and Agfa had done it in Germany with Agfacolor Neu for both home film and slides a little later in 1936). Technicolor introduced Monopack, a single-strip color system in 1941 for use in locations where heavy three-strip cameras could not be used. However, its greater graininess prevented its use for studio work.
Eastman Kodak introduced its first 35mm color film negative in 1950. The first commercial film to use Eastmancolor was the National Film Board of Canada documentary Royal Journey, released in December 1951. In 1952, they released an improved version suitable for production in Hollywood. This allowed Technicolor prints to be made from a single negative and a conventional camera. Foxfire, shot by Universal in 1954, and starring Jane Russell and Jeff Chandler, was the last American film shot with three-strip Technicolor cameras.
In 1952, Eastman Kodak introduced high-quality color film, allowing studios to produce prints through standard photographic processes without having to send them to Technicolor for the expensive ink-embedding process. That same year, Technicolor's lab adapted its ink transfer process to create matrix and embedded prints directly from Eastmancolor negatives, as well as other color stocks such as Ansco and Dupont.
Technicolor introduced its stereoscopic camera for 3D film in March 1953. The system used two three-strip cameras, shooting a total of six strips at one time (three for the right eye and three for the left). Two films were made in this format: Flight to Tangier (1953) and the Martin and Lewis comedy Money From Home (1954). A similar but different system had been used by a different company, which lined up two three-strip cameras side by side for a British short film titled Royal River.
In 1954, Technicolor made prints with less ink transfer for the VistaVision large-format negative format. They also adapted their process for use with Todd-AO, Ultra Panavision 70, and Technirama. All of these were an improvement over three-strip negatives, as earlier negatives produced much more grainy prints.
By the mid-1960s, the ink transfer process fell out of favor in the United States as it was considered too expensive and slow to produce copies. With the increase in theaters in the United States, the standard quantity of between 200 and 250 copies was raised. And while the ink transfer system provided higher color quality, the number of high-speed prints that could be produced in labs across the country surpassed the slow, small number of prints that could be made in Technicolor labs alone.. The last American film released before Technicolor closed its printing plant was The Godfather II (1974).
In 1975, the US ink transfer plant was closed, and Technicolor became a processor solely for Eastman. In 1977, the last remaining printer was used by Dario Argento to make copies of his horror film Suspiria. In 1980, the Italian Technicolor plant ceased printing activity.
The UK line was closed in 1978 and sold to Beijing Film and Video Lab in China. Many Chinese and Hong Kong films were made with the Technicolor ink transfer process, including Zhang Yimou's Ju Dou, and even an American film, Space Avenger (1989).), directed by Richard W. Haines. The Beijing line was closed in 1993 for a number of reasons, including inferior processing.
Reintroduction of the ink transfer process
In 1997, Technicolor reintroduced the ink transfer process into general motion picture production. A refined version of the 1960s and 1970s printing process was used to a limited extent in the restoration of films such as The Wizard of Oz, Rear Window, Funny Girl and Apocalypse Now Redux.
Upon their reintroduction, they used the process in several modern high-budget Hollywood films, including Bulworth, Pearl Harbor and Toy Story. The distinguished look achieved by this process, often sought by filmmakers to recreate the heyday of Technicolor, is difficult to achieve using conventional high-speed processes and is one explanation for the process's enduring demand and credibility.
In 2002, Technicolor eliminated the ink transfer process after Thomson bought the company. Thomson would later change its name in 2010 to Technicolor SA.
Archival Technicolor Ink Transfer
By the late 1990s, the ink transfer process was still offering advantages in the film archiving community. Because the process used stable acid dyes, Technicolor prints are considered archival quality. A Technicolor print from the ink transfer era could retain the original colors virtually unchanged for decades with proper preservation, while Eastmancolor prints from before 1983 suffered color degradation after exposure to ultraviolet light and heat. hot and humid conditions as a result of their more unstable photochemical dyes. In many cases, the degradation is so rapid that in a matter of as little as five to ten years, only the magenta color remains on the film.
An article on the restoration of Star Wars claimed that use was made of a rare print of the ink transfer film made for director George Lucas at the British laboratory of Technicolor during its first exhibition to serve as a color reference for the restoration. The article claimed that conventional color prints of the film had degraded over the years in such a way that no two had the same color balance. However, because of these differences in color balances, ink transfer prints served restoration professionals only as a rough guide.
In addition, the three-strip negatives are all based on black and white silver-based material, which has been preserved over time through proper preservation. This has been of particular importance in recent years with the large market for movies transferred to home video formats. By far the best color quality for video transfer is achieved from Technicolor optical negatives, or by recombining the negatives digitally and printing at low contrast.
One problem that has resulted from Technicolor negatives is the ratio of image shrinkage between one strip and another. As the three negatives were shot on three rolls, they are subject to different shrinkage ratios each, depending on storage conditions. Today, digital technology allows for precise realignment of negatives by resizing digitally shrunk negatives to fit the other negatives. The green negative is usually taken as a reference, since it is the negative with the highest resolution. It is also the negative with the best position in relation to the camera lens. Shrinkage and realignment are not a problem with continuous exposure systems (three colors on a single roll). This problem could have been eliminated for the three-strip titers if the positives had been preserved in successive exposure, but this would have required preservation items to have measured between 1 and 2 km in length, whereas the composite three-strip items occupy between 300 and 600 meters.
One of the problems that modern reproduction has had to deal with is that the contrast of the three film strips is not the same. This gives the effect in Technicolor prints that (for example) fade, that the image's color balance changes as it fades. Transfer to digital media has attempted to correct these color divergences, and has been largely successful. However, there are still some flaws, for example in the saturated parts of the image some false color could be displayed. When an image of a llama is included in a shot, it will rarely appear the expected orange/yellowish color, and will usually appear green.
Technicolor Today
The Technicolor company was a highly successful film processing firm, later working on VHS, CD and DVD audio and video duplication, and digital video processing. MacAndrews & Forber acquired Technicolor in 1982 for $100 million, then sold it in 1988 to British firm Carlton Communications PLC for $780 million. Technicolor Inc acquired film processing company Consolidated Film Industries in 2000. Since 2001, Technicolor has been part of the French-based electronics and media conglomerate formerly known as Thomson. On February 1, 2010, the Thomson group rebranded itself as "Technicolor", acquiring the company-wide name of its American technological subsidiary.
The visual aesthetic of Technicolor ink transfer continues to be used in Hollywood, typically in films set in the mid-20th century. Parts of The Aviator, the Howard Hughes biopic, were digitally manipulated to mimic the color processes available during the periods in which each scene took place. The two-color appearance of the film is incorrectly cited as appearing to be Technicolor's two-color system, when in fact it is a facsimile of Hughes' own color system, Multicolor. The three-strip Technicolor look begins after Hughes' newsreel as he makes the first flight around the world.