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Technicolor





Technicolor is the trademark for a series of Color Film processes pioneered by '''Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation''' (a subsidiary of '''Technicolor, Inc.'''), now a division of Thomson . Technicolor was the second major color film process, after Britain's Kinemacolor , and the most widely used color motion picture process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952. Technicolor became known and celebrated for its Hyper-realistic , saturated levels of color, and was used commonly for filming musicals (such as '' The Wizard Of Oz '' and '' Singin' In The Rain ''), costume pictures (such as '' The Adventures Of Robin Hood '' and '' Joan Of Arc ''), and Animated films (such as '' Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs '' and '' Fantasia '').

The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1915 by Herbert Kalmus , Daniel Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott.


NAME USAGE

The term Technicolor historically has been used to describe four separate concepts:
  • Technicolor process/format - the several image origination systems used in film production, which culminated in the "three-strip" process. (1922-1954)

  • Technicolor dye imbibition printing - a stable photolithographic system used for the creation of color prints, originally conceived for the Technicolor format but also compatible with standard monopack film. (1928-2002, with differing gaps of availability post-1974 depending on lab)

  • Technicolor labs - a collection of Film Laboratories across the world owned and run by Technicolor for post-production services including developing, printing, and transferring films in all major developing processes as well as Technicolor's proprietary ones. Films using these labs thus retain a "Color by Technicolor" credit even though no Technicolor ''format'' or ''printing'' have been offered recently. (1922-present)

  • Technicolor - an umbrella company encompassing all the above as well as other ancillary services. (1915-present)



HISTORY


Two-color Technicolor

Technicolor originally existed in a Two-color (red And Green) System . In Process 1 ( 1917 ), a prism beam-splitter behind the camera lens exposed two adjacent frames of a single strip of black and white negative film simultaneously, one behind a red filter, the other behind a green filter. Because two frames were being exposed at the same time, the film had to be photographed and projected at twice the normal speed. Exhibition required a special projector with two apertures (one with a red filter and the other with a green filter), two lenses, and an adjustable prism that aligned the two images on the screen. Technicolor itself produced the only movie made in Process 1, '' The Gulf Between '', which had a limited tour of Eastern cities, primarily to interest motion picture producers and exhibitors in color. The near-constant need for a technician to adjust the projection alignment doomed this additive color process.