Technicolor is a family of color motion picture processes. The first version, Process 1, was introduced in 1916,. and improved versions followed over several decades.
Definitive Technicolor movies using three black-and-white films running through a special camera (Three-strip Technicolor or Process 4) started in the early 1930s and continued through to the mid-1950s, when the three-strip camera was replaced by a standard camera loaded with single-strip "monopack" color negative film. Technicolor Laboratories were still able to produce Technicolor prints by creating three black-and-white matrices from the Eastmancolor negative (Process 5).
Process 4 was the second major color process, after Britain's Kinemacolor (used between 1909 and 1915), and the most widely used color process in Hollywood during the Golden Age of Hollywood. Technicolor's three-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), Down Argentine Way (1940), and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), costume pictures such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and Gone with the Wind (1939), the film Blue Lagoon (1949), and animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Gulliver's Travels (1939), Pinocchio (1940), and Fantasia (1940). As the technology matured, it was also used for less spectacular dramas and comedies. Occasionally, even films noirsuch as Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Niagara (1953)were filmed in Technicolor.
The "Tech" in the company's name was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Frost Comstock received their undergraduate degrees in 1904 and were later instructors.
Nomenclature The term "Technicolor" has been used historically for at least five concepts: Technicolor: an umbrella company (Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation) encompassing all versions and ancillary services (1914–2025, most recently Technicolor Group). Technicolor labs: a group of film laboratories worldwide, owned and run by Technicolor for post-production services including developing, printing, and transferring films in all major color film processes, as well as Technicolor's proprietary ones (1922–present). Technicolor process or format: several custom imaging systems used in film production, culminating in the "three-strip" process in 1932 (1917–1955). Technicolor IB printing ("IB" abbreviates "imbibition", a dye-transfer operation): a process for making color motion picture prints that allows the use of dyes that are more stable and permanent than those formed in ordinary chromogenic color printing. Originally used for printing from color-separation negatives photographed on black-and-white film in a special Technicolor camera (1928–2002, with differing gaps of availability after 1974, depending on the lab). Prints or Color by Technicolor: used since 1954, when Eastmancolor (and other single-strip color film stocks) supplanted the three-film-strip camera negative method, while the Technicolor IB printing process continued to be used as one method of making the prints. This connotation applies to nearly all films made from 1954 onwardSee section The introduction of Eastmancolor and decline in which Technicolor is named in the credits (1953–present).
Company history Both Kalmus and Comstock went to Switzerland to earn PhD degrees; Kalmus at University of Zurich, and Comstock at Basel in 1906.
In 1912, Kalmus, Comstock, and mechanic W. Burton Wescott formed Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott, an industrial research and development firm. Most of the early patents were taken out by Comstock and Wescott, while Kalmus served primarily as the company's president and chief executive officer.
When the firm was hired to analyze an inventor's flicker-free motion picture system, they became intrigued with the art and science of filmmaking, particularly color motion picture processes, leading to the founding of Technicolor in Boston in 1914 and incorporation in Maine in 1915."What? Color in the Movies Again?" Fortune, October 1934.
In 1921, Wescott left the company; the same year, Technicolor Inc. was chartered in Delaware."$1,000,000 Company Will Color Movies", The New York Times, September 21, 1922, p. 1."Technicol.-Prizma Controversy", The Wall Street Journal, December 7, 1922, p. 12.
In 1966, the company created a division known as Vidtronics, which developed a system used in the late 1960s and early 1970s that allowed experimenting with video gear and videotape to make ads and feature-length motion pictures by transferring the videotape to film for final release and distribution.From Kinescopes to Digital Cinema Films made with this process were the 1973 film Why, the 1971 film The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler, and the most famous film using this process, Frank Zappa's 1971 film 200 Motels, which was originally shot on 2 inch quadruplex videotape, and then transferred to film by Technicolor, being the first independent film originally to be shot on videotape and distributed theatrically in 35 mm.
Color process history Two-color Technicolor Process 1
Technicolor originally existed in a two-color (red and green) system. In Process 1 (1916), a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two consecutive 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.Cinematographic Multiplex Projection, &c. U.S. Patent No. 1,391,029, filed February 20, 1917.
The results were first demonstrated to members of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in New York on February 21, 1917."Moving Pictures in Color", The New York Times, February 22, 1917, p. 9. Technicolor itself produced the only movie made in Process 1, The Gulf Between, which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, beginning with Boston and New York on September 13, 1917, 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.
Process 2
Convinced that there was no future in additive color processes, Comstock, Wescott, and Kalmus focused their attention on subtractive color processes. This culminated in what would eventually be known as Process 2 (1922) (often referred to today by the misnomer "two-strip Technicolor"). As before, the special Technicolor camera used a beam-splitter that simultaneously exposed two consecutive frames of a single strip of black-and-white film, one behind a green filter and one behind a red filter."The First Successful Color Movie", Popular Science, Feb. 1923, p. 59.
The difference was that the two-component negative was now used to produce a subtractive color print. Because the colors were physically present in the print, no special projection equipment was required and the correct registration of the two images did not depend on the skill of the projectionist.
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. After development, each print was toned to a color nearly complementary to that of the filter: orange-red for the green-filtered images, cyan-green for the red-filtered ones. Unlike tinting, which adds a uniform veil of color to the entire image, toning chemically replaces the black-and-white silver image with transparent coloring matter, so that the highlights remain clear (or nearly so), dark areas are strongly colored, and intermediate tones are colored proportionally.
The two prints, made on film stock half the thickness of regular film, were then cemented together back to back to create a projection print. The Toll of the Sea, which debuted on November 26, 1922, used Process 2 and was the first general-release film in Technicolor.
The second all-color feature in Process 2 Technicolor, 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) was the third all-color Process 2 feature.
Although successful commercially, Process 2 was plagued with technical problems. Because the images on the two sides of the print were not in the same plane, both could not be perfectly in focus at the same time. The significance of this depended on the depth of focus of the projection optics. Much more serious was a problem with cupping. Films in general tended to become somewhat cupped after repeated use: every time a film was projected, each frame in turn was heated by the intense light in the projection gate, causing it to bulge slightly; after it had passed through the gate, it cooled and the bulge subsided, but not quite completely."Kalmus, Herbert. "Technicolor Adventures in Cinemaland", Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, December 1938"
It was found that the cemented prints were not only very prone to cupping, but that the direction of cupping would suddenly and randomly change from back to front or vice versa, so that even the most attentive projectionist could not prevent the image from temporarily popping out of focus whenever the cupping direction changed. Technicolor had to supply new prints so the cupped ones could be shipped to their Boston laboratory for flattening, after which they could be put back into service, at least for a while.
The presence of image layers on both surfaces made the prints especially vulnerable to scratching, and because the scratches were vividly colored they were very noticeable. Splicing a Process 2 print without special attention to its unusual laminated construction was apt to result in a weak splice that would fail as it passed through the projector. Even before these problems became apparent, Technicolor regarded this cemented print approach as a stopgap and was already at work developing an improved process.
Process 3
Based on the same dye-transfer technique first applied to motion pictures 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 dye imbibition. The Technicolor camera for Process 3 was identical to that for Process 2, simultaneously photographing two consecutive frames of a black-and-white film behind red and green filters.
In the lab, skip-frame printing was used to sort the alternating color-record frames on the camera negative into two series of contiguous frames, the red-filtered frames being printed onto one strip of specially prepared "matrix" film and the green-filtered frames onto another. After processing, the gelatin of the matrix film's emulsion was left proportionally hardened, being hardest and least soluble where it had been most strongly exposed to light. The unhardened fraction was then washed away. The result was two strips of relief images consisting of hardened gelatin, thickest in the areas corresponding to the clearest, least-exposed areas of the negative.