Technicolor
- Alternate use: Technicolor (physics)
The three-strip Technicolor process used three strips of black-and-white film (hence the "three-strip" designation) and a beam splitter or split-cube prism. The prism split the light into three components: green, red, and blue. The green component was registered onto a strip of panchromatic black-and-white film; the blue was registered onto a strip of red-emulsion-coated black-and-white film; and the red was registered onto another strip of red-senstive panchromatic black-and-white. The red and blue strips were mated back-to-back, in a "bipack" arrangement, with the blue-sensitive film in front.
To print the film, each colored strip had a "relief-positive" print struck from it, which was then bleached to remove the silver and then soaked with a dye that was the exact chromatic opposite of the color in question: cyan for red, magenta for green, and yellow for blue.
Each of the three dye-soaked strips were brought into contact with a single clear strip of film, with each color built up in a successive pass. Such a process was referred to by Technicolor as "dye imbibation", which was commonly used in conventional offset printing or lithography but which the Technicolor process adapted to film. The final strip of film would have the dyes soaked into it and not simply printed onto its surface, which produced rich and deeply saturated color.
Sometimes the clear film would be pre-exposed with a composite panchromatic black-and-white positive image derived from the other three negatives, as a way to deepen the blacks and heighten the contrast of the image.
Technicolor originally existed in a two-strip (red and green) system, and then as a subtractive color system where the color information was carried directly onto the film and not projected through filters. Toll of the Sea debuted on November 26, 1922 as the first general release film to use two-tone Technicolor (The Gulf Between was the first film to do so but it was not widely distributed). These early films were not popular with projectionists because the two colored strips were glued together, which gave a very thick inflexible film, which separated and damaged easily. Although there was no blue present in the image of this process, the eye somehow manages to perceive a very limited amount of blue in the projected image. This may be because the brain expects some familiar parts of the image to have blue coloring and itself fills in the missing imformation.
A four-strip technicolor process was also used on a few films in the 1940's. The fourth strip was simply black-and-white and improved contrast.
One major drawback of Technicolor's 3-strip process was that it required a special Technicolor camera. Film studios were never allowed to buy these cameras. Instead they had to hire them from the Technicolor corporation, complete with a number of camera technicians and a 'color co-ordinator', more often than not, Natalie Kalmus herself. Natalie's name appears in the credits of virtually every Technicolor film made, in spite of the fact that she was frequently banned from film sets because her concept of color co-ordination usually differed to that of the artistic directors (as her choice of hats often demonstrated!). Herbert Kalmus's name very seldom appears anywhere because he did not like publicity.
The process of splitting the image through a prism reduced the amount of light that reached the film stock. Since film speeds were fairly slow in the 1930s-1940s to begin with, early Technicolor productions required an excessive amount of lighting. It is reported that temperatures on the film set of The wizard of Oz frequently exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, 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 have suffered permanent eye damage from the high levels of illumination.
When George Eastman (of Kodak fame) released his one-strip color negative film it meant that Technicolor prints could be struck from a single camera negative exposed in a standard camera. However, in the mid-1950s Eastman also introduced a means of producing prints through standard photographic processes (as opposed to the expensive dye imbibation process). This meant studios could make color prints in their own labs, rather than having to send them to Technicolor. However, the major blow for Technicolor was that since the Eastman system used just a single strip of film, any standard film camera became capable of filming in color.
Technicolor eventually fell out of favor in the United States as being too expensive. The last major American film released in Technicolor was The Godfather, Part II (1974) In 1975, the last three-strip plant was closed and sold to Beijing Film and Video Lab in China; a great many films from China and Hong Kong have since been made in the Technicolor process (and one American film: Space Avenger [1989, director: Richard W. Haines]).
The Technicolor company remained a higly successful film processing firm and later became involved in video and audio duplication (CD, VHS and DVD manufacturing) and digital video processes.
By the late 1990s the dye-transfer process still had its advantages. Its distinctive "Technicolor look" was hard to obtain by any other means, and it remained the most archivally stable color process. In fact whereas many earlier Eastman color movies have almost completely lost their original colors, Technicolor movies have retained their color practically unchanged. This has become of importance in recent years with the large market for films transferred to video formats for home viewing. The best transfer by far is achieved by transfering the original Technicolor (monochrome) negatives, adding the color electronically, using a Technicolor print to provide the reference point for the color.
In 1997 Technicolor reintroduced the dye-imbibation process to film production.
An article on the 1997 restoration of (original version 1977) claimed that a rare dye-transfer print of the movie, made for director George Lucas, had been used as a color reference for the restoration.
The company was purchased by Thomson Multimedia in 2001, who subsequently discontinued the dye-transfer process the next year.
From a technical standpoint: the rich colors that the Technicolor process gave came in part from the fact that the color was not added to the process until the final stages. The color information was recorded and processed as separate black and white images which were relatively easy to control and preserve. The Eastman process, by contrast, had color actually on the processed color negative, which then had to be transfered photographically to the final color print.
The color control that was available in the Technicolor process was even available to the camera operators, and many actors and actresses can recall standing on the set for long periods holding a board of colored squares (known as "The Lily") while the camera technicians balanced the colors in the camera. The Eastman color camera operator, conversely, was largely stuck with the color balance of the negative stock as supplied. The Eastman company produced two versions of their film stock, one balanced for studio lighting, the other balanced for daylight. The camera operator did have a limited control using colored filters over the camera lens or even the lighting.