When was technicolor invented

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View manifest View in Mirador. This camera was one of several used to film the Oz scenes. These are the questions that many of us asked as kids, after seeing our first black and white movie. Technically speaking, the first movie in color, Cupid Angling , came out in But the process used to colorize the picture, the Douglass natural color process, was incredibly hard to pull off.

It took a long time for Technicolor to settle on the best process for getting the full spectrum of color in its pictures. One reason for this is that the company was using a two color system in their cameras which only produced one strip of negatives. Although it is great to see that some of them are being restored. Although the dye-transfer process was incredible for its time, it proved to be a logistical nightmare. If Technicolor was going to move forward, it was clear it needed a new system.

And instead of recording only one negative, this new camera recorded three. Each of the three negatives were responsible for either red, blue, or green. Still confused? The three strip process required a gargantuan amount of work from the Pre-Production process all the way through Post-Production.

Today, everybody with a smartphone has an HD camera at their disposal. But by this point, and for the first time, Technicolor filmmaking was made widely possible. At the time, this was viewed as a quantum leap forward for cinema. But although many knew about the changes, few had seen them all put together in a single picture. There were two movies that changed everything for color in film and the world of animation : these were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz.

It was also the first full-length cel-animated film and first animated feature in the English language. But many film-goers were still curious to see how three color Technicolor would look in live-action. Enter The Wizard of Oz — perhaps the most famous Technicolor movie of all time. All of the scenes in Kansas are shot in sepia.

But when Dorothy is whisked into the land of Oz, the visuals saturate with color, which brings us with her into another world. For many, this was the first time they had seen a film in color. Not only is The Wizard of Oz enshrined in the annals of cinema history for its production design , but for its technical brilliance as well. The visuals are perhaps more immersive and more staggering than any of its contemporaries. At the time, Technicolor cameras required incredibly bright lights to work as intended.

It got so hot in those costumes that the crew feared for their safety. Fortunately, the cast and crew made it through production mostly unscathed. But many were left traumatized or sick — including the original Tin Man actor Buddy Ebsen, who was poisoned from the silver make-up. The first system that captured natural color on film was Kinemacolor , which caused a sensation in Britain in Kinemacolor imploded amid patent disputes, but not before an intrigued American engineer named Herbert Kalmus brought a fragment of Kinemacolor film back to the US.

Kalmus showed the film to his business partners Daniel Frost Comstock and W. Burton Wescott. Kalmus and Wescott met at MIT, and had only a passing interest in cinema as an art form. They were more interested in the technical challenges -- and the moneymaking opportunities. The three men founded the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation in Comstock was the inventor, Wescott turned ideas into products and Kalmus served as the businessman. To create a color film that did away with the fringing and flicker that plagued existing color systems, the Technicolor team had to innovate all the way from the treatment of the film to the design of the camera and projector.

Their first Technicolor process involved shooting on black and white film through a special beam-splitting prism and red and green filters. To play the film back, the system was essentially reversed, with a special projector that contained its own red and green filters. Like Kinemacolor, this was known as an "additive" color system. The first tests made the Technicolor boys optimistic. Comstock and a team of engineers headed to Palm Beach, Florida, where natural light and colorful environments abounded.

The resulting footage of sunsets, sailboats and fancy women's outfits delighted the engineers -- and their investors. The next step: a feature film that could be shown to a mass audience.

The plot of "The Gulf Between" is perhaps less notable than the innovation going on behind the scenes. Based on the story "The Little Skipper" by Anthony Kelly, it told of a young girl lost at sea and brought up by the family of a smuggler. Later, she falls in love with a wealthy boy, only for his parents to keep them apart until she rediscovers her own family. The melodrama was "very typical of the kind of films of the time," Fox says. But it was the technical difficulties that undid them.

Technicolor's seasoned production manager, Carl Alfred "Doc" Willatt, brought in a relatively inexperienced -- and therefore easily supervised -- year-old director, Wray Bartlett Physioc, to helm "The Gulf Between. Filming in Technicolor required strong natural light, so the production headed for Jacksonville, Florida, in December Jacksonville was a popular filming location for the burgeoning motion picture industry because it had clear skies most of the year.

Even the film's interior scenes were shot on open-air stages to capture as much light as possible.