Color motion picture film
Color motion picture film refers both to unexposed color photographic film in a format suitable for use in a motion picture camera, and to finished motion picture film, ready for use in a projector, which bears images in color.
The first color cinematography was by
During 1930s the first practical subtractive color processes were introduced. These also used black-and-white film to photograph multiple color-filtered source images, but the final product was a multicolored print that did not require special projection equipment. Before 1932, when three-strip Technicolor was introduced, commercialized subtractive processes used only two color components and could reproduce only a limited range of color.
In 1935,
Later color films were standardized into two distinct processes: Eastman Color Negative 2 chemistry (camera negative stocks, duplicating interpositive and internegative stocks) and Eastman Color Positive 2 chemistry (positive prints for direct projection), usually abbreviated as ECN-2 and ECP-2. Fuji's products are compatible with ECN-2 and ECP-2.
Film was the dominant form of cinematography until the 2010s, when it was largely replaced by digital cinematography.[2]
Overview
The first motion pictures were photographed using a simple homogeneous photographic emulsion that yielded a black-and-white image—that is, an image in shades of gray, ranging from black to white, corresponding to the luminous intensity of each point on the photographed subject. Light, shade, form and movement were captured, but not color.
With color motion picture film, information about the color of the light at each image point is also captured. This is done by analyzing the visible spectrum of color into several regions (normally three, commonly referred to by their dominant colors: red, green and blue) and recording each region separately.
Current color films do this with three layers of differently color-sensitive photographic emulsion coated on one strip of
Each photographed color component, initially just a colorless record of the luminous intensities in the part of the spectrum that it captured, is processed to produce a transparent dye image in the color
Tinting and manual coloring
The earliest motion picture stocks were
Many early filmmakers from the first ten years of film also used this method to some degree.
The first commercially successful stencil color process was introduced in 1905 by
A more common technique emerged in the early 1910s known as
A complementary process, called toning, replaces the silver particles in the film with metallic salts or mordanted dyes. This creates a color effect in which the dark parts of the image are replaced with a color (e.g., blue and white rather than black and white). Tinting and toning were sometimes applied together.[4]
In the United States, St. Louis engraver Max Handschiegl and cinematographer Alvin Wyckoff created the
Tinting and toning continued to be used well into the sound era. In the 1930s and 1940s, some western films were processed in a sepia-toning solution to evoke the feeling of old photographs of the day. Tinting was used as late as 1951 for Sam Newfield's sci-fi film Lost Continent for the green lost-world sequences. Alfred Hitchcock used a form of manual-coloring for the orange-red gun-blast at the audience in Spellbound (1945).[3] Kodak's Sonochrome and similar pre-tinted stocks were still in production until the 1970s and were used commonly for custom theatrical trailers and snipes.
In the last half of the 20th century, Norman McLaren, who was one of the pioneers in animated movies, made several animated films in which he directly manually painted the images, and in some cases, also the soundtrack, on each frame of the film. This approach was previously employed in the early years of movies, late 19th and early 20th century. One of the precursors in color manual painting frame by frame were the Aragonese Segundo de Chomón and his French wife Julienne Mathieu, who were Melies' close competitors.
Tinting was gradually replaced by natural color techniques.
Physics of light and color
A three-color theory of combination, which informs that all colors are created by combining the three main hues of red, blue, and green, was first established by
These principles on which color photography is based were first proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1855 and presented at the Royal Society in London in 1861.[3] By that time, it was known that light comprises a spectrum of different wavelengths that are perceived as different colors as they are absorbed and reflected by natural objects. Maxwell discovered that all natural colors in this spectrum as perceived by the human eye may be reproduced with additive combinations of three primary colors—red, green, and blue—which, when mixed equally, produce white light.[3]
Between 1900 and 1935, dozens of natural color systems were introduced, although only a few were successful.[6]
Psychological and theoretical uses of color in film
Color psychology is an essential aspect of the film industry. Hermann Von Helmholtz began investigating the physiological responses to color in the mid-1800s.[7] His and other research changed the way filmmakers approach color in their productions, which prompted standards in technology and aesthetics for the use of color in the film industry.[8] The film-making process involves color choices, which can have a significant impact on how the audience perceives a story. The perception of color is influenced by various elements, such as the context in which each color is observed, the material properties they exhibit, the cultural framework in which they are presented, as well as each individual viewer's subjective response.[8]
The film industry recognizes the impact of color on human psychology as it plays a key role in filmmaking by creating the right mood, directing attention, and evoking certain emotions from the audience. Filmmakers use different color combinations to communicate various emotions to the audience. The moods and psychological states of characters are often conveyed by colored lights, while object colors, in conjunction with the colors attributed to characters costumes, hair, and skin tones, establish relationships or conflicts.[8]
The way that light affects our perception of color can be defined by the principles of additive and subtractive color. Additive color theory states that colors come from the addition of light, while subtractive color theory states that colors are created by the absorption of light. Hermann von Helmholtz's
Additive color
The first color systems that appeared in motion pictures were additive color systems. Additive color was practical because no special color stock was necessary. Black-and-white film could be processed and used in both filming and projection. The various additive systems entailed the use of color
The pioneering three-color additive system was patented in England by
Practical color in the motion picture business began with
William Friese-Greene invented another additive color system called Biocolour, which was developed by his son Claude Friese-Greene after William's death in 1921. William sued George Albert Smith, alleging that the Kinemacolor process infringed on the patents for his Bioschemes, Ltd.; as a result, Smith's patent was revoked in 1914.[3] Both Kinemacolor and Biocolour had problems with "fringing" or "haloing" of the image, due to the separate red and green images not fully matching up.[3]
By their nature, these additive systems were very wasteful of light. Absorption by the color filters involved meant that only a minor fraction of the projection light actually reached the screen, resulting in an image that was dimmer than a typical black-and-white image. The larger the screen, the dimmer the picture. For this and other case-by-case reasons, the use of additive processes for theatrical motion pictures had been almost completely abandoned by the early 1940s, though additive color methods are employed by all the color video and computer display systems in common use today.[4]
Subtractive color
The first practical subtractive color process was introduced by Kodak as "Kodachrome", a name recycled twenty years later for a very different and far better-known product. Filter-photographed red and blue-green records were printed onto the front and back of one strip of black-and-white duplitized film. After development, the resulting silver images were bleached away and replaced with color dyes, red on one side and cyan on the other. The pairs of superimposed dye images reproduced a useful but limited range of color. Kodak's first narrative film with the process was a short subject entitled Concerning $1000 (1916). Though their duplitized film provided the basis for several commercialized two-color printing processes, the image origination and color-toning methods constituting Kodak's own process were little-used.
The first truly successful subtractive color process was William van Doren Kelley's Prizma,[14] an early color process that was first introduced at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City on 8 February 1917.[15][16] Prizma began in 1916 as an additive system similar to Kinemacolor.
However, after 1917, Kelley reinvented the process as a subtractive one with several years of short films and travelogues, such as Everywhere With Prizma (1919) and A Prizma Color Visit to Catalina (1919) before releasing features such as the documentary Bali the Unknown (1921), The Glorious Adventure (1922), and Venus of the South Seas (1924). A Prizma promotional short filmed for Del Monte Foods titled Sunshine Gatherers (1921) is available on DVD in Treasures 5 The West 1898–1938 by the National Film Preservation Foundation.
The invention of Prizma led to a series of similarly printed color processes. This bipack color system used two strips of film running through the camera, one recording red, and one recording blue-green light. With the black-and-white negatives being printed onto duplitized film, the color images were then toned red and blue, effectively creating a subtractive color print.
After experimenting with additive systems (including a
The process was later refined through the incorporation of dye imbibition, which allowed for the transferring of dyes from both color matrices into a single print, avoiding several problems that had become evident with the cemented prints and allowing multiple prints to be created from a single pair of matrices.[4]
Technicolor's early system were in use for several years, but it was a very expensive process: shooting cost three times that of black-and-white photography and printing costs were no cheaper. By 1932, color photography in general had nearly been abandoned by major studios, until Technicolor developed a new advancement to record all three primary colors. Utilizing a special
The three negatives were then printed to gelatin matrices, which also completely bleached the image, washing out the silver and leaving only the gelatin record of the image. A receiver print, consisting of a 50% density print of the black-and-white negative for the green record strip, and including the soundtrack, was struck and treated with dye mordants to aid in the imbibition process (this "black" layer was discontinued in the early 1940s). The matrices for each strip were coated with their complementary dye (yellow, cyan, or magenta), and then each successively brought into high-pressure contact with the receiver, which imbibed and held the dyes, which collectively rendered a wider spectrum of color than previous technologies.[19] The first animation film with the three-color (also called three-strip) system was Walt Disney's Flowers and Trees (1932), the first short live-action film was La Cucaracha (1934), and the first feature was Becky Sharp (1935).[5]
Gasparcolor, a single-strip 3-color system, was developed in 1933 by the Hungarian chemist Dr. Bela Gaspar.[20]
The real push for color films and the nearly immediate changeover from black-and-white production to nearly all color film were pushed forward by the prevalence of television in the early 1950s. In 1947, only 12 percent of American films were made in color. By 1954, that number rose to over 50 percent.[3] The rise in color films was also aided by the breakup of Technicolor's near monopoly on the medium.
In 1947, the United States Justice Department filed an antitrust suit against Technicolor for monopolization of color cinematography (even though rival processes such as Cinecolor and Trucolor were in general use). In 1950, a federal court ordered Technicolor to allot a number of its three-strip cameras for use by independent studios and filmmakers. Although this certainly affected Technicolor, its real undoing was the invention of Eastmancolor that same year.[3]
Monopack color film
In the field of motion pictures, the many-layered type of color film normally called an integral tripack in broader contexts has long been known by the less tongue-twisting term monopack. For many years, Monopack (capitalized) was a proprietary product of Technicolor Corp, whereas monopack (not capitalized) generically referred to any of several single-strip color film products, including various Eastman Kodak products. It appeared that Technicolor made no attempt to register Monopack as a trademark with the
Monopack color films are based on the subtractive color system, which filters colors from white light by using superimposed cyan, magenta and yellow dye images. Those images are created from records of the amounts of red, green and blue light present at each point of the image formed by the camera lens. A subtractive primary color (cyan, magenta, yellow) is what remains when one of the additive primary colors (red, green, blue) has been removed from the spectrum. Eastman Kodak's monopack color films incorporated three separate layers of differently color sensitive emulsion into one strip of film. Each layer recorded one of the additive primaries and was processed to produce a dye image in the
Kodachrome was the first commercially successful application of monopack multilayer film, introduced in 1935.[21] For professional motion picture photography, Kodachrome Commercial, on a 35mm BH-perforated base, was available exclusively from Technicolor, as its so-called "Technicolor Monopack" product. Similarly, for sub-professional motion picture photography, Kodachrome Commercial, on a 16mm base, was available exclusively from Eastman Kodak. In both cases, Eastman Kodak was the sole manufacturer and the sole processor. In the 35mm case, Technicolor dye-transfer printing was a "tie-in" product.[22] In the 16mm case, there were Eastman Kodak duplicating and printing stocks and associated chemistry, not the same as a "tie-in" product. In exceptional cases, Technicolor offered 16mm dye-transfer printing, but this necessitated the exceptionally wasteful process of printing on a 35mm base, only thereafter to be re-perforated and re-slit to 16mm, thereby discarding slightly more than one-half of the end product.
A late modification to the "Monopack Agreement", the "Imbibition Agreement", finally allowed Technicolor to economically manufacture 16mm dye-transfer prints as so-called "double-rank" 35/32mm prints (two 16mm prints on a 35mm base that was originally perforated at the 16mm specification for both halves, and was later re-slit into two 16mm wide prints without the need for re-perforation). This modification also facilitated the early experiments by Eastman Kodak with its negative-positive monopack film, which eventually became Eastmancolor. Essentially, the "Imbibition Agreement" lifted a portion of the "Monopack Agreement's" restrictions on Technicolor (which prevented it from making motion picture products less than 35mm wide) and somewhat related restrictions on Eastman Kodak (which prevented it from experimenting and developing monopack products greater than 16mm wide).
By 1953, and especially with the introduction of anamorphic wide screen
Technicolor continued to offer its proprietary imbibition dye-transfer printing process for projection prints until 1975, and even briefly revived it in 1998. As an archival format, Technicolor prints are one of the most stable color print processes yet created, and prints properly cared for are estimated to retain their color for centuries.[25] With the introduction of Eastmancolor low-fade positive print (LPP) films, properly stored (at 45 °F or 7 °C and 25 percent relative humidity) monopack color film is expected to last, with no fading, a comparative amount of time. Improperly stored monopack color film from before 1983 can incur a 30 percent image loss in as little as 25 years.[26]
Functionality
A color film is made up of many different layers that work together to create the color image. Color negative films provide three main color layers: the blue record, green record, and red record; each made up of two separate layers containing silver halide crystals and dye-couplers. A cross-sectional representation of a piece of developed color negative film is shown in the figure at the right. The triacetate base is 0.005 inch thick, the total thickness of the emulsion and other coatings is less than 0.0015 inches.[27]
The three color records are stacked as shown at right, with a UV filter on top to keep the non-visible ultraviolet radiation from exposing the silver-halide crystals, which are naturally sensitive to UV light. Next are the fast and slow blue-sensitive layers, which, when developed, form the latent image. When the exposed silver-halide crystal is developed, it is coupled with a dye grain of its complementary color. This forms a dye "cloud" (like a drop of water on a paper towel) and is limited in its growth by development-inhibitor-releasing (DIR) couplers, which also serve to refine the sharpness of the processed image by limiting the size of the dye clouds. The dye clouds formed in the blue layer are actually yellow (the opposite or complementary color to blue).[28] There are two layers to each color; a "fast" and a "slow." The fast layer features larger grains that are more sensitive to light than the slow layer, which has finer grain and is less sensitive to light. Silver-halide crystals are naturally sensitive to blue light, so the blue layers are on the top of the film and they are followed immediately by a yellow filter, which stops any more blue light from passing through to the green and red layers and biasing those crystals with extra blue exposure. Next are the red-sensitive record (which forms cyan dyes when developed); and, at the bottom, the green-sensitive record, which forms magenta dyes when developed. Each color is separated by a gelatin layer that prevents silver development in one record from causing unwanted dye formation in another. On the back of the film base is an anti-halation layer that absorbs light which would otherwise be weakly reflected back through the film by that surface and create halos of light around bright features in the image. In color film, this backing is "rem-jet", a black-pigmented, non-gelatin layer which is removed in the developing process.[27]
Eastman Kodak manufactures film in 54-inch (1,372 mm) wide rolls. These rolls are then slit into various sizes (70 mm, 65 mm, 35 mm, 16 mm) as needed.
Manufacturers of color film for motion picture use
Motion picture film, primarily because of the rem-jet backing, requires different processing than standard C-41 process color film. The process necessary is ECN-2, which has an initial step using an alkaline bath to remove the backing layer. There are also minor differences in the remainder of the process. If motion picture negative is run through a standard C-41 color film developer bath, the rem-jet backing partially dissolves and destroys the integrity of the developer and, potentially, ruins the film.
Kodak color motion picture films
In the late 1980s, Kodak introduced the T-Grain emulsion, a technological advancement in the shape and make-up of silver halide grains in their films. T-Grain is a tabular silver halide grain that allows for greater overall surface area, resulting in greater light sensitivity with a relatively small grain and a more uniform shape that results in a less overall graininess to the film. This made for sharper and more sensitive films. The T-Grain technology was first employed in Kodak's EXR line of motion picture color negative stocks.[29] This was further refined in 1996 with the Vision line of emulsions, followed by Vision2 in the early 2000s and Vision3 in 2007.
Fuji color motion picture films
Fuji films also integrated tabular grains in their SUFG (Super Unified Fine Grain) films. In their case, the SUFG grain is not only tabular, it is hexagonal and consistent in shape throughout the emulsion layers. Like the T-grain, it has a larger surface area in a smaller grain (about one-third the size of traditional grain) for the same light sensitivity. In 2005, Fuji unveiled their Eterna 500T stock, the first in a new line of advanced emulsions, with Super Nano-structure Σ Grain Technology.
See also
- 135 film
- 35mm film
- Cinecolor
- Color photography
- Film base
- Film stock
- Kinemacolor
- List of color film systems
- List of early color feature films
- List of film formats
- List of motion picture film stocks
- Multicolor
- Photographic film mainly about film for stills
- Prizma
- Technicolor
References
- ^ "Martin Scorsese on world's first colour film discovery". BBC News. 22 September 2012.
- ^ Hurley, Michael (2 January 2014). "Studios Abandon Film, Small Theaters Struggle – And There's a Happy Ending". Indiewire. Archived from the original on 1 February 2016. Retrieved 5 February 2016.
- ^ ISBN 0-393-95553-2
- ^ ISBN 0-452-00980-4
- ^ ISBN 0-06-273089-4
- ^ ISBN 0-19-502806-6.
- ^ ISSN 1097-3729.
- ^ ISSN 1542-4235.
- ^ "World's first colour moving pictures discovered". BBC News. 12 September 2012.
- ^ Pritchard, B. (2012). "Lee-Turner Project with the National Media Museum". Retrieved 20 April 2013.
- ^ Singh, Anita (12 September 2012). "World's first colour film unveiled". The Telegraph.
- ISBN 978-0859892964.
- ^ (1917) "Kinemacolor" How to Make and Operate Moving Pictures Funk & Wagnalls. Courtesy of Wide Screen Museum
- ISBN 0-87910-139-3
- ^ Museum Notes, The American Museum Journal (1917), vol. 17, p. 150.
- ^ Cornwell-Clyne, Adrian. (1951) Colour Cinematography Chapman and Hall press.
- ^ Gracyk, Tim. Leon F. Douglass: Inventor and Victor's First Vice-President (Retrieved on 2007-03-26)
- ISBN 0-87910-139-3
- ^ Hart, Martin (2003). "The History of Technicolor" Widescreenmuseum.com. Retrieved 2006-07-07.
- ^ "Gasparcolor: Perfect Hues for Animation". Fischinger Archive.
- ^ Exploring the Color Image (1996) Eastman Kodak Publication H-188.
- ^ The tie-in ensures the quality of the tied-good when the tied good (dye-transfer printing, in this case) is used in conjunction with the tying good (Three-Strip or Monopack origination, in this case), paraphrasing Tie-in Sales and Price Discrimination, S. J. Liebowitz, University of Texas at Dallas.
- ^ a b Chronology of Motion Picture Films: 1940–1959 Archived 2009-06-25 at the Wayback Machine, Kodak.
- ^ At one point, Technicolor implemented a two-tiered print pricing structure, one for dye-transfer prints, which favored large volume printing, and one Eastmancolor prints, which favored small volume printing—but this was after the "tie-in" between origination and printing had been broken by the abandonment of Three-Strip and Monopack origination. For small print runs, dye-transfer remained an option, but at a significantly higher cost.
- ^ Wilhelm, Henry; Brower, Carol (1993). "The Extraordinarily Stable Technicolor Dye Imbibition Motion Picture Color Print Process". The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs (PDF). Preservation Publishing Company. pp. 345–366. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-06-19.
- ^ Holben, Jay (June 1999). "Preserving Negatives for the Next Generation" American Cinematographer Magazine ASC Press. pp. 147–152.
- ^ a b Making Kodak Film: The Illustrated Story of State-of-the-Art Photographic Film Manufacturing, Robert L. Shanebrook, 2010, Rochester, New York.
- ^ Holben, Jay. (April 2000). "Taking Stock" Part 1 of 2. American Cinematographer Magazine ASC Press. pp. 118–130
- ^ Probst, Christopher. (May 2000). "Taking Stock" Part 2 of 2 American Cinematographer Magazine ASC Press. pp. 110–120
Further reading
- John Waner, Hollywood's Conversion of All Production to Color, Tobey Publishing, 2000.
External links
- Timeline of Historical Film Colors
- BBC article on the first color film
- The American Widescreen Museum has a thorough treatise on early motion picture color processes.
- List of films in Prizma at IMDb
- "Animation in Natural Colours", Moving Pictures, 1912.