Kinemacolor, Technicolor AND Three Color Process

KINEMACOLOR

Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to

1914. It was invented by George Albert Smith in 1906. From 1909 on, the process was known and

trademarked as Kinemacolor. It was a two-colour additive colour process, photographing and projecting

a black-and-white film behind alternating red and green filters. In this system, only two colour filters are

used in taking the negatives and only two in projecting the positives.

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.

Kinemacolor enjoyed the most commercial success in the UK where, between 1909 and 1918, it was

shown at more than 250 entertainment venues.

Kinemacolor in the U.S. became most notable for its Hollywood studio being taken over by D. W.

Griffith,

The Adopted Child (1911)

Aldershot Views (1912)

All's Well That Ends Well (1914)

TECHNICOLOR

Technicolor, (trademark), motion-picture process using dye-transfer techniques to produce a colour print.

The Technicolor process, perfected in 1932, originally used a beam-splitting optical cube, in combination

with the camera lens, to expose three black-and-white films. The light beam was split into three parts as it

entered the camera, one beam favouring the red portion of the spectrum, one favouring the green, and one

the blue.

It was the second major color process, after Britain's Kinemacolor (used between 1908 and 1914), and the

most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952. Technicolor's 3-color process became

known and celebrated for its highly saturated color, and was initially most commonly used for filming

musicals such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Gulliver's

Travels (1939).

THREE COLOR PROCESS

Present-day colour photographic processes are tricolour systems, reproducing different colours that occur

in nature by suitable combinations of three primary-coloured stimuli. Each of these primary colours—

blue-violet, green, and red—covers roughly one-third of the visible spectrum. Tricolour impressions can

be produced by combining coloured lights (additive synthesis) or bypassing white light through

combinations of complementary filters, each of which holds back one of the primary colours (subtractive

synthesis).

IMPORTANT POINTS ABOUT COLOUR IN CINEMA

1. Absence of colour was noted by cinema’s earliest viewers. Colour came to be added to cinema

through the above-mentioned processes but its importance in cinema has not been sufficiently

evaluated.

Political science (BA Honours)

University of Delhi

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