Everything about Technicolor totally explained
Technicolor is the trademark for a series of
color film processes pioneered by
Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation (a subsidiary of
Technicolor, Inc.), now a division of
Thomson SA. 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
Herbert Kalmus,
Daniel Frost Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott.
Name usage
The term
Technicolor historically has been used to describe four separate concepts:
- Technicolor process/format - the several image origination systems used in film production, which culminated in the "three-strip" process. (1922–1954)
- Technicolor dye imbibition printing (aka "dye transfer") - a stable photolithographic system used for the creation of color prints, originally conceived for the Technicolor format but also compatible with standard monopack film. (1928–2002, with differing gaps of availability post-1974 depending on lab)
- Technicolor labs - a collection of film laboratories across the world owned and run by Technicolor for post-production services including developing, printing, and transferring films in all major developing processes as well as Technicolor's proprietary ones. Films using these labs thus retain a "Color by Technicolor" credit even though no Technicolor format or printing have been offered recently. (1922–present)
- Technicolor - an umbrella company encompassing all the above as well as other ancillary services. (1915–present)
History
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. Only a few frames of
The Gulf Between, showing star
Grace Darmond, are known to exist today.
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 frames exposed behind the green filter were printed on one strip of black and white film, and the frames exposed behind the red filter were printed on another strip. 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, made of film stocks thinner than regular film, 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 fourth feature to be filmed entirely in Technicolor. The first sound Technicolor feature (with a synchronized sound track and sound effects) was
The Cavalier (1928), which was also the last feature to be photographed in Process 2.
Although successful commercially, Process 2 had technical problems of its own: the film images on the two cemented matrices didn't share the same plane, sometimes creating a soft focus, depending on the
depth of field of the projector's optics. More destructively, the uneven thickness of the film would cause it to cup irregularly, taking it further out of focus and damaging the film. The presence of the image on both sides of the print could lead to twice the amount of scratches being visible onscreen with normal wear. 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. Splicing became difficult as both emulsions had to be scraped before applying cement, and the irregular thickness of the base could cause splices that were either too heavy or too weak, breaking the film as it went through the projector. 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.
Based on the
Handschiegl Color Process created in 1916 by Max Handschiegl,
Technicolor Process 3 (1928) was developed to eliminate the projection print made of double-cemented prints, in favor of a print created by a process similar to
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.
The first feature made entirely in the Technicolor Process 3 was
The Viking (1928), which had a synchronized score and sound effects.
Redskin (1929), with a synchronized score, and
The Mysterious Island (1929), a part-talkie, were photographed almost entirely in this process also but included some sequences in black and white. The following talkies were made entirely in Technicolor Process 3:
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),
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),
The 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, 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 became the first color movie to use a
widescreen process (using a system known as
Vitascope, which used 65mm film).
In 1931, a new Technicolor process was developed which removed grain from the Technicolor film and resulted in a more vivid and vibrant color. This process was first used on a Radio Picture entitled:
The Runaround (1931). The new process not only improved the color but also removed specks (that looked like bugs) from the screen, which had previously blurred outlines and lowered visibility. This new improvement along with a reduction in cost (from 8.85 cents to 7 cents per foot) led to a new color revival.
Warner Brothers led the way once again by producing three features (out of an announced plan for six features) in the new process:
Manhattan Parade (1932),
Doctor X (1932) and
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Radio Pictures followed by announcing plans to make four more features in the new process. Only one of these,
Fanny Foley Herself (1931), was actually produced. Although
Paramount Pictures announced plans to make eight features and
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer promised two color features, these never materialized. This seems to have been as a result of the lukewarm reception of the public to these new color pictures. Two independently produced features were also produced in this improved Technicolor process: (1934) and
Kliou the Tiger (1935).
Very few of the original camera negatives of movies made in Technicolor Process 2 or 3 survive. In the late 1940s, most were discarded from storage at Technicolor in a space-clearing move, after the studios declined to reclaim the materials. Those that survived into the 1950s were often used to make black and white prints for television and simply discarded thereafter. This explains why so many early color films exist today solely in black and white.
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 Warners 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 didn't 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
As early as 1924, Technicolor envisioned a full-color process, and by 1929, the company was actively developing such a process. Hollywood made so much use of Technicolor in 1929 and 1930, that many believed that Hollywood would soon be turning out color films exclusively. By 1931, the
Great Depression took its toll on the movie industry, and they began to cut back on expenses. The production of color films had decreased dramatically by 1932, when Technicolor unveiled its first three-color process in an attempt to entice the movie studios. Light passed through the lens and was then divided 50-50 by a beam splitting prism block. The green aspect of the scene was recorded through a filter on an orthochromatically sensitized film strip, while the light behind a magenta filter was further broken down by a
bipack of a film strip panchromatically sensitized for red and a non-sensitized for blue light. The blue record film bore a red gelatin filter layer. This process accurately reproduced the full color spectrum and optically printed using a dye-transfer process in cyan, magenta and yellow.
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 in 1934 an exclusive contract for the use of the process, going to September 1935. Competitors such as the
Fleischer Studios and the
Ub Iwerks studio were shut out — they'd 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 C. Cooper, producer for
RKO Radio Pictures and director of
King Kong (1933), 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 adopted in 1934 solely for cartoon work: the camera would contain one strip of black and white negative film, and each animation cel would be photographed three times, on three sequential frames, behind alternating red, green, and blue filters. Three separate dye transfer printing matrices would be created from the red, green, and blue records in their respective additive colors, cyan, magenta and yellow.
Shooting Technicolor footage, 1934–1954
Technicolor's advantage over most early, natural color processes was that it was a
subtractive synthesis rather than an
additive one. Technicolor prints could run on any projector; unlike other additive processes, it could represent colors clearly without any special projection equipment or techniques. More importantly, Technicolor held the best balance between a quality image and speed of printing, compared to other subtractive systems of the time.
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 ⅓ 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 ⅔ 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-sensitive strip of
panchromatic stock. The "blue" and "red" films were layered into a "bipack". 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 percent 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
frame lines that would otherwise be white. Because the layer was of neutral density, the contrast blacks in the picture was increased, but colors were muted to an extent. By the early 1940s, however, Technicolor streamlined the process to make up for these shortcomings and this practice ceased. However, a black-and-white silver image was still used for the frame line and sound track.
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 made for 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
MGM feature
The Cat and the Fiddle, released
February 16,
1934. On
July 28,
1934,
Warner Brothers released
Service With a Smile, followed by
Good Morning, Eve! on
August 5, both being comedy
short films starring
Leon Errol and filmed in three-strip Technicolor. Pioneer Pictures, a movie company formed by Technicolor investors, produced the film usually credited as the first live-action short film shot in the three-strip process,
La Cucaracha released
August 31,
1934.
La Cucaracha is 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, 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 sequences of
The House of Rothschild (
20th Century Pictures/
United Artists) with
George Arliss and
Kid Millions (
Samuel Goldwyn Studios) with
Eddie Cantor.
Pioneer/
RKO's
Becky Sharp (
1935) became the first
feature film photographed entirely in three-strip Technicolor. Initially, three-strip Technicolor was only used indoors; then, in 1936,
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine became the first production to have outdoor sequences, with impressive results. The spectacular success of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (
1937), which was released in December 1937 and became the top-grossing film of 1938, caused the studios to sit up and take notice.
Limitations and difficulties
One major drawback of Technicolor's 3-strip process was that it required a special, bulky, and very heavy Technicolor camera. Film studios couldn't 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 circumvented 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 a greater 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 by
Universal, starring
Jane Russell and
Jeff Chandler, 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 color negatives from which they were derived, the cyan record faded in as little as five years.
The same year, Technicolor unveiled their own
stereoscopic camera rig for the ever-growing demand of
3-D films. The rig utilized two three-strip cameras, running a total of six strips of film at once (three for the left eye and three for the right). Only two films were shot with this camera set-up: the Nat Holt production of
Flight to Tangier with
Jack Palance,
Joan Fontaine, and
Corinne Calvet, and the Hal Wallis production of
Money From Home, starring
Dean Martin and
Jerry Lewis. Previously a similar, but different system had been used by a different company, utilizing two three-strip cameras side-by-side for a short called
Royal River.
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 and too slow in turning out prints. While paying audience numbers were decreasing, the number of movie screens in the US was increasing. And while dye-transfer printing yielded superior color printing, the number of high speed prints that could be struck in labs all over the country outweighed the fewer, slower number of prints that could only be had in Technicolor's labs. The last new American film released before Technicolor closed their dye plant was
The Godfather, Part II (1974).
In 1975, the US dye transfer plant was closed and Technicolor became an Eastman-only processor. In 1977, the final dye-transfer printer left in Rome was used by Dario Argento to make prints for his horror film
Suspiria. In 1980, the Italian Technicolor plant ceased printing dye transfer. The British line was shut down in 1978 and sold to Beijing Film and Video Lab in China. A great many films from China and Hong Kong were 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 for a number of reasons, due in part to inferior processing.
Recent developments
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.
MacAndrews & Forbes Group acquired Technicolor, Inc. in 1982 for $100 million, then sold it in 1988 to the British firm
Carlton Communications PLC for $780 million. Technicolor, Inc. acquired the film processing company
Consolidated Film Industries in
2000. Technicolor is now part of the French-headquartered electronics and media conglomerate
Thomson.
Dye transfer Technicolor in archival work
By the late 1990s the dye transfer process still had its advantages in the film archival community. Because the dye transfer process used stable
Azo dyes, Technicolor prints are considered of archival quality. A Technicolor print from the dye transfer era will retain its original colors virtually unchanged for decades with proper storage, whereas Eastmancolor prints prior to 1983 would suffer color fading as a result of less stable photochemical dyes. Fading on some prints was so rapid that in many cases, after as little as ten years only the magenta record would remain on the film.
Furthermore, Technicolor's negatives before 1954 were all on silver-based black and white stock, which stayed unaltered 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 onto low-contrast Color Reversal Internegatives.
In 1997, Technicolor reintroduced the dye transfer process to general film production. It was also 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 during its initial run, 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 conventional, high-speed printing methods and is one explanation for the enduring demand and credibility of the process.
The latest motion picture dye IB (imbibition) transfer process developed during the 1990s is greatly superior to the process used during the 1970s and of much higher quality than modern Eastmancolor stocks. The prints exhibited a higher color gamut and color satauration than modern Eastmancolor stock and could be made consistently and accurately for large numbers of prints. There were no longer visible density and contrast variations that occurred most often with earlier three color Technicolor. The new process was also about as sharp as modern Eastmancolor process with slightly higher contrast, but they appeared sharper due to the higher contrast.
Technicolor was purchased by French company
Thomson in 2001 from the British company
Carlton Communications, which discontinued the dye-transfer process in 2002.
The visual aesthetic of dye transfer Technicolor 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Technicolor'.
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