This content originally appeared on Envato Tuts+ Tutorials and was authored by Marie Gardiner
Colour in film: Early innovations
Filmmakers were looking to add colour to their films pretty much from the start of cinema itself. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries they experimented with various methods, including some really early hand colouring and stencil use.
Hand colouring meant manually painting individual frames of film and one of the first films to use this was colouring in a dancer’s dress in Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895), which was made by Edison Manufacturing Company—yes, that’s Thomas Edison’s company!
Filmmaker Georges Méliès was so taken with the technique that he actually employed 21 women in his studio to hand colour frames, but this didn’t work well for longer films, it all just took too long.
Pathécolor
Mechanised stencil colouring was introduced by Pathé in 1905, which helped streamline things a bit and films like Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) were re-released with stencil colour. Pathécolor used a stencil for each colour, lining them up with the film print to apply it frame by frame. In the 1910s, as films moved to mass production, this was replaced by mechanised tinting and toning.
Kinemacolor
Another early attempt at creating colour films was Kinemacolor, developed by George Albert Smith and Charles Urban in 1908. This used a rotating filter to film and then project red and green images. It did create a rudimentary colour effect, but it also suffered from fringing and ghosting issues (remember those 3D glasses?). Still, it was used in over 100 films, including With Our King and Queen Through India (1912) and Kinemacolor proved the commercial viability of colour films which encouraged more experimenting.
Tinting and toning
Tinting involved dyeing the film strip to add a specific colour, like blue for night scenes for example. The idea is that all the light areas become coloured. Toning, is sort of the opposite, it colours the black areas of a film with another colour, leaving the white areas untouched. Each technique on its own created a monochrome image where the colour reflected the setting or mood of the scene.
D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) is tinted and toned to show varying moods and times of day. Using them both in combination would give a two-colour effect. By the 1920s nearly all US films had at least one sequence in colour, but after 1927 it was more or less abandoned.
Technicolor
Technicolor used dye-transfer techniques to create colour prints. Technicolor was an evolving process that started in the 1910s with a result similar to Kinemacolor and then went through a series of different methods, but it’s the three-strip Technicolor process from 1932 that everyone typically means when they say Technicolor, as it quickly became the standard. This involved a beam-splitting optical cube and the camera lens to expose three black-and-white films simultaneously, each one capturing a different part of the spectrum (red, green, and blue). These images were then developed separately and dyed in their respective colours. When they were combined, they produced a close representation of natural colour. The first feature-length film to use this process was Becky Sharp (1935).
Later, a single tri-pack colour negative film was used during filming, and from those, three colour-separated negatives were created and then dyed to produce a full-colour image.
Technicolor dominated Hollywood through the ‘30s and ‘40s and this is often referred to as the Golden Age of Technicolor. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940) showed off the creation of lush, saturated colours. One of the most iconic uses of Technicolor is of course in The Wizard of Oz in 1939 with the memorable transition from sepia-toned Kansas to the Technicolor splendour of Oz, which as well as being visually impressive, was a good demonstration of the emotional and narrative power of colour. Technicolor required significant investment and resources though, so it was really only for big-budget, high profile films.
Alternative colour processes
While Technicolor was the most famous and widely used colour process, there were other methods contributing to the evolution of colour in cinema too. Processes like Cinecolor and Trucolor were more affordable alternatives, albeit with some compromises in quality.
Cinecolor
Cinecolor was a two-colour film process introduced in the early 1930s that was similar to early Technicolor, and was supposed to be a more affordable alternative. It was used extensively in low-budget films, particularly Westerns and animation, like Cowboy and the Prizefighter (1949). Cinecolor worked using a bipack method, where two strips of film run simultaneously through the camera, one sensitive to red and the other to blue and green.
The two-strip method is what meant it was cheaper than Technicolor’s more complicated and expensive three-strip process. This did mean of course that Cinecolor's palette was restricted, quite often causing an unfortunate unnatural look. Cinecolor was still popular though, for its cost-effectiveness and for its simpler technology, which meant colour filmmaking was more accessible to smaller studios and productions.
Trucolor
Trucolor was developed by Republic Pictures in the 1940s as a successor to their earlier Magnacolor process, and was primarily used in Republic’s own productions. It was another two-colour system, and when it did eventually evolve to three it was still cheaper than Technicolor and easier to use, but the colours were less vibrant. Like Cinecolor, it was used to keep costs down, and a lot of Westerns with smaller budgets - like Johnny Guitar (1954) – were made with Trucolor.
Side note: Colour and sound
Jumping back a little, it’s worth noting that the introduction of sound into films had a direct affect on how they were coloured. Sound synchronisation sometimes took precedence over other technical aspects, such as colour quality, and in early colour processing, the methods were already sensitive and complex, so the additional demands of sound recording sometimes led to compromises in how colour was managed and reproduced on screen.
The technological limitations of early colour processes also meant that they were sometimes incompatible with the new sound equipment and techniques. The film stocks used for colour photography were sometimes less stable or more prone to issues when used with the latest sound recording equipment, which could result in problems with colour consistency and quality. All a bit of a mess really!
Post-Technicolor: Eastmancolor
Eastmancolor, by the founder of Kodak, George Eastman, was a revolutionary one-strip colour film process introduced in 1950, that was easier to use and more cost-effective than Technicolor. This was a pivotal change for the industry and it quickly unseated Technicolor’s three-strip as the industry go-to. The Searchers (1956) used Eastmancolor film and was processed by Technicolor (who continued to do print processing under Technicolor IB). As Eastmancolor was cheaper to use, filmmakers started to experiment with colour more.
Film stock kept improving over the next couple of decades, with high-speed colour negative films which were better for low-light conditions. To colour correct or colour change, films would be sent off to a lab to be washed with chemicals that would achieve the desired look, but it could be pretty hit and miss.
Telecine
Telecine machines allowed films to be transferred to formats that could be broadcast on colour television, which was becoming more popular in the 1960s. It was a bridge between traditional film production and modern digital formats and the idea was that it preserved the colour and quality of the original film.
Digital colouring
It was actually the 1980s when we started to see early forms of digital technology being brought into colour processing. Filmmakers could scan film into a digital format, change the colours, and then output back to film. This tech was called Digital intermediate (DI) and meant that film could be scanned at a high resolution. Once the film is digitised it can be imported into colour grading software (and also have VFX added).
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), directed by the Coen brothers was one of the first films to be digitally colour graded, and that was to achieve a sepia toned Depression-era aesthetic that would have been hard to get with traditional methods.
Digital colouring improved colour accuracy and also meant extensive post-production adjustments were possible. This, of course, then led to the use of CGI to further adjust colour in cinema, like the richly coloured world of Avatar (2009).
HDR
High Dynamic Range has given us a broader range of colours and greater contrast, resulting in more vivid and realistic images. HDR works by increasing the difference between the brightest whites and the darkest blacks – the dynamic range! It also offers a wider colour gamut, meaning we can represent hues that were previously impossible to display. Films like The Revenant (2015) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) have made great use of HDR to enhance visual storytelling.
How colour changed the film industry
Colour quickly became an essential tool for filmmakers, one that could be used to evoke emotions, highlight certain themes, and enhance visual symbolism. Alfred Hitchcock is a great example of an auteur who used colour to great effect in films like Vertigo (1958), with red used for danger and obsession, and green for envy, renewal, and ‘otherworldliness’.
Colour also meant the expansion of genres and styles in cinema. Horror films like House of Wax (1953) and Suspiria (1977) used vivid, lurid colours to create creepy, unsettling atmospheres.
In contrast, the counterculture movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s meant more vibrant, playful colours, as in A Clockwork Orange (1971).
The ability to use colour creatively opened up new possibilities for visual storytelling, leading to the development of distinctive directorial styles.
Influence on animation
Colour's impact wasn't limited to live-action films; early animated films, like Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), used Technicolor, and the success of Disney's early colour animations set the stage for the future of animated films, where colour became integral part of the process.
Conclusion
From the earliest hand-coloured frames to today’s digital grading tools, the evolution of colour has transformed the film industry. The use of colour is an indispensable tool for filmmakers and over the decades, innovations like Technicolor, Eastmancolor and Digital intermediate have played important roles in allowing us to see colour on the big screen and this has improved the visual quality of films and also opened up a world of storytelling opportunities.
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About this page
This page was written by Marie Gardiner. Marie is a writer, author, and photographer. It was edited by Ian Yates.
This content originally appeared on Envato Tuts+ Tutorials and was authored by Marie Gardiner
Marie Gardiner | Sciencx (2024-07-24T11:34:21+00:00) A brief history of colour in film. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2024/07/24/a-brief-history-of-colour-in-film/
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