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Topic: The First Color Motion Picures Made in 1902
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-13-2012 06:10 AM
Sorry to nit pick, but I've got a problem with casually calling this footage the first colour movie. Two problems, in fact.
No. 1 - the definition of a colour movie. If it's defined as all three colour records being recorded at the point of initial photography, then maybe. But even so, there are other contenders - this one, also from 1902, for example. And stencil colouring goes back to the mid-1890s and hand colouring to the early 1890s. Furthermore, although these techniques are not photographic colour (because the colour is added after the film is shot and developed), they're still colour.
No. 2 - the definition of first. Turner might have managed to shoot it, but like Louis Le Prince and his film of Leeds (now Roundhay) Bridge, he wasn't able to show it. They perfected working cameras, but not projectors (or any other type of reproducing device, for that matter). We are only able to view these films as moving images now by using technology that did not exist when they were shot. That does rather complicate Turner's claim to be the first.
So this is a fascinating piece in the jigsaw, and further proof that lots of people were working on additive, filter-based systems in the early 1900s, some more successfully than others, but to call it the first colour movie without any exploration or qualification is sloppy journalism.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-13-2012 08:52 AM
I never stopped to think that the movie might not have ever been projected.
I just figured that, if he had the technology to record a moving image, he must have had the technology to play it. Didn't some of the pioneers use the same machine to play the movie as to record it? I seem to remember reading about that.
The sprocket holes looked knarly. I would hardly call them "sprocket holes" but rather "registration pin holes." In retrospect, I can't imagine them standing up to the abuse of being projected more than once or twice, if ever.
I suppose, if you define a color photograph as "that which can be viewed in color without some kind of manipulation by the end user," I agree with you that this isn't a color picture. However, the theory of how the color image is recorded remains the same. Only the execution differs.
Even modern color film still records the R/G/B or C/M/Y components of the picture separately. The difference is that, in modern film, the color components are layered one on top of the other. Either by using dyes or sensitizing chemicals in or between the component layers, the colors of light are filtered out so that each layer records only the color it was designed to.
Kodachrome film, if not reversal processed and subjected to color development isn't color film, either. The recorded image is black and white. Without the special Kodachrome process development, you only get black and white.
Neither is Technicolor truly color. Its image is recorded on three separate pieces of film. If not for the dye imbibation printing process, it would not be color film, either.
Just about the only process that I can think of that comes close to true "color photography" would be the Autochrome process. Autochrome uses dyed starch to act as color filters for both photography and viewing. It's similar to the way the Bayer filter on a digicam works only you don't need a computer to demosaic the results.
Turner could not have used Autochrome. Autochrome has only ever been done on glass plates, as far as I know. It would be interesting to know if it has ever been done on a flexible medium.
Therefore, given the technology of the time, I can't think of any other way that a color motion picture could be recorded on film.
While I don't think it is nitpicking to say that Turner's invention either is or is not truly a color movie I do think comparing his process to modern color processes is like comparing Karl Benz's Motorwagen to a Formula-One race car.
When you come right down to it, all photography is black and white at its root. It is only through tricks of chemistry, machines or computers that we see it in color.
I would say that Turner's process would be considered an early, experimental color process but it is not comparable to modern color processes on any means.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-13-2012 09:53 AM
quote: Randy Stankey
I just figured that, if he had the technology to record a moving image, he must have had the technology to play it. Didn't some of the pioneers use the same machine to play the movie as to record it? I seem to remember reading about that.
The key to it was the invention of film. The principle whereby if you reproduced images in quick enough succession and with even enough illumination, you produced the impression of a moving image, was understood as least as far back as the early c19. After photography became widespread in the 1850s, an army of inventors across the world spent the next half century trying to combine the two technologies, but it was the projector that got them. Louis Le Prince is probably the best known example: he made a single-lens camera with photosensitised paper as the recording medium. That's fine for shooting, but paper is opaque and thus NFG for projection. He then tried moving image frames on glass slides with wooden frames, shown using what was in effect a Kodak Carousel slide projector, inserting and removing them from a gate at around 8fps. He couldn't get it to work fast enough, and there is one surviving account of it jamming and blowing up, showering fragments of glass and wood all over the place. But as soon as film was around, the Edison Kinetoscope soon followed, and then projectors appeared all over the place at around the same time (the Lumières in France, Armat in the United States, Messter in Germany, Paul in Britain, etc. etc. etc.) within half a decade.
quote: Randy Stankey
I suppose, if you define a color photograph as "that which can be viewed in color without some kind of manipulation by the end user,"
Personally I had recording more in mind than reproduction - in order words, the colour information is recorded in the camera along with the greyscale image. That would distinguish it from technologies where colour is added as an artistic process after photography (e.g. hand colouring, stencil colouring, tinting and toning) and not recorded in the actual act of photography.
quote: Randy Stankey
Kodachrome film, if not reversal processed and subjected to color development isn't color film, either. The recorded image is black and white. Without the special Kodachrome process development, you only get black and white.
Neither is Technicolor truly color. Its image is recorded on three separate pieces of film. If not for the dye imbibation printing process, it would not be color film, either.
But the colour information is present on the film after it's shot, just as it is with Turner's system.
quote: Randy Stankey
ust about the only process that I can think of that comes close to true "color photography" would be the Autochrome process. Autochrome uses dyed starch to act as color filters for both photography and viewing. It's similar to the way the Bayer filter on a digicam works only you don't need a computer to demosaic the results.
Turner could not have used Autochrome. Autochrome has only ever been done on glass plates, as far as I know. It would be interesting to know if it has ever been done on a flexible medium.
Dufaycolor is arguably very similar to Autochrome, in that the dye is present (as a visible to the naked eye dye) on the film before exposure. It's the closest I can think of to Autochrome in any moving image photographic system. It has the other distinction of being about the only three-colour system before E6 that could be processed by amateurs in the home, because the emulsion was just normal, panchromatic b/w.
Agreed that Turner could not realistically have approached the problem any other way - my point was that (a) he wasn't the only one trying that way at around that time, and (b) the journalist should at least have tried a little bit to unpack what exactly we mean by 'colour movie'.
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 09-13-2012 11:59 AM
I forgot about Dufaycolor. ![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Although Turner's work predates Dufay by a few years, I suppose the technology could have been used. Just because somebody invents or patents something in a particular year, it doesn't mean the guy wasn't working on it some years before. Right?
You're right. If the image isn't contained in one, single frame of film, it isn't truly color film but a only color reproducing process. Regardless of the machinations needed to achieve the end result, even Technicolor is color film because, in the end, there is a single image that contains all of the color information.
That's why I would call Turner's method an experimental color process but not color film. Then, by extension, not really a color "movie" in the way we think of movies.
Yes, I also think the National Media Museum is engaging in a little more hyperbole than is appropriate. If it was never projected or viewed in some fashion, it isn't a movie. Just as that word processor file on your computer hard drive isn't really a letter until somebody displays or prints it, you can't call it a movie until it is viewed. If other people were working on the same thing at the same time and produced viewable results, how can you say Turner was the first?
All you can really say is that Turner created a prototype.
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Stephen Furley
Film God
Posts: 3059
From: Coulsdon, Croydon, England
Registered: May 2002
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posted 09-15-2012 09:12 AM
quote: Randy Stankey
I just figured that, if he had the technology to record a moving image, he must have had the technology to play it. Didn't some of the pioneers use the same machine to play the movie as to record it? I seem to remember reading about that.
I can think of other examples or recordings which couldn't be reproduced. Optical sound recordings were being made before they could be reproduced, I'm not sure who was the first to do it, and Baird recorded early experimental television signals onto disks which have only quite recently been reproduced.
I would think that almost all of the pioneers used the same machine as camera and projector, and usually as printer as well. Why build three separate machines, very similar to each other when you could build just one and adapt it for each purpose?
quote: Randy Stankey
Kodachrome film, if not reversal processed and subjected to color development isn't color film, either. The recorded image is black and white. Without the special Kodachrome process development, you only get black and white.
Neither is Technicolor truly color. Its image is recorded on three separate pieces of film. If not for the dye imbibation printing process, it would not be color film, either.
Kodachrome was unusual in not having the couplers incorporated in the emulsion during manufacture, but if you take a much more conventional colour film, like Ektachrome for example, you can process it to a black and white negative or positive or a colour negative or positive. It's not the film but the way that you process it which determines what you get. It's designed for colour reversal processing (E6),but some people do process it as a negative (C41) to get special effects, and some labs will also provide this service. I did it once just to show somebody what a colour negative looks like without the orange masking.
Just about any black and white film can be reversal processed to produce a positive image, though some work better than others; Ilford Pan F works well.
Obviously, putting a black and white film through a colour process won't give you a colour image, but the image can be coloured by toning, and it is possible for the shadows and highlights to be toned different colours by purely chemical means.
You have to be careful with a term like 'Technicolor'. Technicolor is a company, not a process. Over the years they used several different processes, two colour additive, two colour cemented positive, two colour imbibition, three colour imbibition, from either three strip or successive exposure negatives,or from matrices made from negative or reversal chromogenic colour materials. Old films were sometimes re-printrd in later processes, three strip films were later printed on Eastmancolor for example. Describing a film as 'In Technicolor' can mean many things, as can 'In 70mm', or 'In widescren'
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