Posted
on July 30, 2016
Before
there were color motion pictures (animated or live-action), there were black-and-white motion pictures. Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse made
his debut in the B&W film Steamboat Willie, in 1928.
Even
after color was inserted into the movie biz, it was what is known as
a “two-color additive color process.” The company was
Kinemacolor. Color was achieved by photographing and projecting a
black-and-white film behind alternating red and green filters.
As
usual with “motion pictures,” which of course are a whole bunch
of still pictures rapidly shown, our brain does the work of mixing
rapidly alternating colors as well as seeing action rather than
rapidly changing stills.
Still,
it seems to me that a B&W film shown behind red and green filters
would result in not-very brightly colored scenes. Rather muddy, in
fact.
And
I'd be right:
 |
| A sample scene of Kinemacolor |
And
then there was technicolor!
Starting
in 1916 and being improved by leaps and bounds over the next few
decades, Technicolor offered much brighter, more saturated colors.
The later, more advanced 3-strip process required a special camera
that used three separate rolls of black and white film. A beam
splitter inside the camera caused the light coming through the lens
to be split into two parts, and before the light hit the film, it
passed through one of two filters. One B&W film strip collected
light that had come through a green filter; the rest of the light
passed through a magenta filter. Behind the magenta filter were the
other two strips of film. The front film was a red-blind film – it
recorded only blue light – and there was a coating on that film
that prevented the blue light from continuing on to the last strip of
film. The only light that hit that strip was the red-dominated light.
Super
complicated, right?
The
fact is, though, that this sort of “subtractive synthesis”
resulted in brighter, more saturated colors than the additive
process. And the because there were three colors (green, blue, and
red) rather than just two (red and green), the full range of colors
became available.
Just
because this new process had been invented, it didn't mean that
Hollywood would adopt it. But Walt Disney was one of the first (maybe
THE first?). And on this date in 1932, Walt Disney's Silly Symphony
called Flowers and Trees was released in full-color
Technicolor.
Flowers
and Trees was a success! People loved it, critics loved it, and
Disney won his first competitive Academy Award, for Animated Short
Subject. (That same year, 1932, he won an honorary Academy Award for
the creation of Mickey Mouse.
Check
out Flowers and Trees.
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