Technological problems were at the heart of the difficult adoption of colour by the film industry in the 1930s up to the 1960s. Most studios perceived the technique as defaulting and were not prepared to make the change to a process seen as tricky and unsteady. The birth of Technicolor in 1915 is remembered as a decisive event in the history of coloured films. Founded by Herbert Kalmus, it introduced film-makers to the two-colour subtractive process, where two negatives capturing red and green lights were placed back to back. Warner Bros used it in 1929 for On With The Show! and other studios started to follow suit, but the lack of quality in release-printing and its cost halted Technicolor’s rise.Ĭonsequently, it released a three-strip process in 1932, where two 35mm strips of black and white film negatives, one sensitive to blue and the other to red, ran together through an aperture behind a magenta filter. A separate strip allowed the green light to pass through behind a green filter. The lights were divided through a prism and refracted by mirrors through the different filters, all in a single camera. Technicolor process – prints.īut such an elaborate process was time-consuming. The cameras were very heavy, which limited their transportations and excluded outdoor shooting.
The colour images had to be clear throughout the whole film, and one of the biggest problems when using Technicolor was to produce enough light. Keeping the lighting consistent was a complex matter as the process was slower it needed brighter lighting, and had a narrower latitude, which means that shadows were more liable to black out and brightness to white out.
The cinematographer Franz Planer said that ‘in colour, you may have an exterior sequence that requires three or four days to shoot the sequence. Shooting throughout the day you run into vast changes in colour and lighting’ 2. It therefore needed to be shot indoors, and used more electrical power. The Society of Motion Picture Engineers Studio Lighting Committee reported in 1936 that average black-and-white set illumination required 250 to 400 foot-candles, whereas colour productions needed 800 to 1000 3.
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