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Kinemacolor

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A frame from George Albert Smith's early colour film ''Two Clowns'' (c. 1907)

Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914. It was invented by George Albert Smith in 1906.[1][2] He was influenced by the work of William Norman Lascelles Davidson and, more directly, Edward Raymond Turner.[3] It was launched by the Charles Urban Trading Company of London in 1908. From 1909 on, the process was known and trademarked as Kinemacolor and was marketed by Charles Urban’s Natural Color Kinematograph Company. Urban sold Kinemacolor licenses around the world. It was a two-colour additive colour process, photographing a black-and-white film behind alternating red/orange and blue/green filters and projecting them through red and green filters.[4]

Process

"How to Make and Operate Moving Pictures" published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1917 notes the following:

Of the many attempts to produce cinematograph pictures... the greatest amount of attention so far has been attracted by a system invented by George Albert Smith, and commercially developed by Charles Urban under the name of "Kinemacolor." In this system (to quote from Cassell's Cyclopædia of Photography, edited by the editor of this present book), only two colour filters are used in taking the negatives and only two in projecting the positives. The camera resembles the ordinary cinematographic camera except that it runs at twice the speed, taking thirty-two images per second instead of sixteen, and it is fitted with a rotating colour filter in addition to the ordinary shutter. This filter is an aluminium skeleton wheel... having four segments, two open ones, G and H; one filled in with red-dyed gelatine, E F; and the fourth containing green-dyed gelatine, A B. The camera is so geared that exposures are made alternately through the red gelatine and the green gelatine. Panchromatic film is used, and the negative is printed from in the ordinary way, and it will be understood that there is no colour in the film itself.[5]

To shoot Kinemacolor films, cameramen had to choose between a variety of red/orange and blue/green filters depending on the subject. Despite this, the films were projected through a single set of red and green filters.[4] Modern research has matched the red projection filter to 25 Sunset Red (with a peak transmission above 610nm) and the green projection filter to 122 Fern Green (with a peak of around 510 to 540 nm).[6][7][8] Projected frame rate was also confirmed to be between 30 and 32 frames per second.[6]

Premiere

A Visit to the Seaside

At the press opening of the Urbanora House in London on 1 May 1908, Charles Urban presented Kinemacolor films which he stated were not taken with the intention to be shown in front of an audience. A second demonstration in England took place once again in the Urbanora House on 23 July 1908, in front of the Lord Mayor of London as well as 60 other guests. On 26 February 1909, the general public first saw Kinemacolor in a programme at the Palace Theatre in London. By this time, the process was known as Kinemacolor, a suggestion from Arthur Binstead, a journalist at Sporting Life, after Urban offered a £5 prize to anyone who could come up with a name. The programme consisted of 21 films mainly shot around Brighton and the French Riviera.[9]

On 6 July 1909, George Albert Smith presented a programme of 11 Kinemacolor films at Knowsley Hall before King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. The films included military subjects as well as a party at Knowsley Hall and the King himself. Edward was pleased with the films.[9][10]

The process was first seen in the United States on 11 December 1909, at an exhibition staged by Smith and Urban at Madison Square Garden in New York City.[11] In 1909, Urban formed the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, which produced most Kinemacolor films.[12]

Success and decline

Kinemacolor enjoyed the most commercial success in the UK where, between 1909 and 1918, it was shown at more than 250 entertainment venues.

In 1910, Urban's Natural Color Kinematograph Company produced the first color newsreel, The Funeral of King Edward VII (1910), the first notable Kinemacolor production which proved to be a financial success. That year, the company released the first dramatic film made in the process, By The Order of Napoleon. Urban showed several popular Kinemacolor films at the Scala Theatre, including From Bud to Blossom (1910), Unveiling of the Queen Victoria Memorial (1911), Coronation of George V (1911), The Investiture of HRH The Prince of Wales at Carnavon (1911), as well as a collection of films titled Kinemacolor Egyptian Series.[9][13]

Coronation Drill at Reedham Orphanage (1911)

The company also produced the documentary films With Our King and Queen Through India (also known as The Durbar at Delhi, 1912) and the notable recovery of £750,000 worth of gold and silver bullion from the wreck of P&O's SS Oceana in the Strait of Dover (1912).[14] With The Fighting Forces of Europe (1914) and the dramas The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1914), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1914) were among the last feature films released in Kinemacolor.[9]

The system was made available to exhibitors either by license or from 1913 through a series of touring companies. Although in most cases the system stayed at licensed venues for only a few months there were instances where it remained at a hall for up to two years.[15] Companies dedicated to producing Kinemacolor films were established around the world, including in the United States, France and Japan. Kinemacolor was popular with members of the British royal family, and both Emperor Taishō and Pope Pius X saw Kinemacolor films in 1913.[4]

Frame from Coronation of George V (1911)

However, the company was never a success, partly due to the expense of installing special Kinemacolor projectors in cinemas. Also, the process suffered from "fringeing" and "haloing" of the images, an unsolvable problem as long as Kinemacolor remained a successive frame process. Kinemacolor in the U.S. became most notable for its Hollywood studio being taken over by D. W. Griffith, who also took over Kinemacolor's uncompleted project to film Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, which eventually became The Birth of a Nation (1915). The 11⁄2 reels shot in Kinemacolor are lost, and the finished film is entirely in black-and-white.

The first (additive) version of Prizma Color, developed by William Van Doren Kelley in the U.S. from 1913 to 1917, used some of the same principles as Kinemacolor. In the UK, William Friese-Greene developed another additive colour system for film called Biocolour. However, in 1914 George Albert Smith sued Friese-Greene for infringing Kinemacolor's patents, slowing the development of Biocolour by Friese-Greene and his son Claude in the 1920s.

Predecessor process

In 2012, the National Media Museum in Bradford, England publicized its digital restoration of some very early three-colour alternating-filter test films, dated to 1902, made by Edward Raymond Turner. They are believed to be the earliest existing colour film footage. Turner's process, for which Charles Urban had provided financial backing, was adapted by Smith after Turner's sudden death in 1903, and this in turn became Kinemacolor.[16]

List of films made in Kinemacolor

See also

References

  1. ^ US941960A, Smith, George Albert, "Kinematograph apparatus for the production of colored pictures", issued 1909-11-30 
  2. ^ Smith (25 July 1907). Improvements in, and relating to, Kinematograph Apparatus for the Production of Coloured Pictures - British patent 26,607 (PDF).
  3. ^ "William Norman Lascelles Davidson". Who's Who of Victorian Cinema. Retrieved 31 October 2007. ... Although his work was ultimately unsuccessful, it played its part in influencing the development of Kinemacolor, the world's first successful natural colour motion picture system, invented by Davidson's neighbour in the English south coast town of Southwick, near Brighton, G.A. Smith. ...
  4. ^ a b c I colori ritrovati. Kinemacolor e altre magie. / Kinemacolor And Other Magic. Edizioni Cineteca di Bologna. 2017. ISBN 978-8899196417.
  5. ^ Widescreen Museum
  6. ^ a b "Recreating Kinemacolor on the Screen". www.brianpritchard.com. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  7. ^ "LEE 025 Sunset Red - Colour Filters & Gels". LEE Filters. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  8. ^ "LEE 122 Fern Green - Colour Gel for Lighting". LEE Filters. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
  9. ^ a b c d McKernan, Luke (2018). Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925. University of Exeter Press. ISBN 978-0859892964.
  10. ^ Anonymous (July 1909). "Animated Pictures in Natural Colours". The BioScope. 144.
  11. ^ urbanora (15 June 2008). "Colourful stories no. 11 – Kinemacolor in America « The BioScope". Bioscopic.wordpress.com. Retrieved 26 February 2014.
  12. ^ "Natural Color Kinematograph Company Limited 1909 - 1915". Science Museum Group.
  13. ^ Natural Color Kinematograph Co., Ltd. (1913). Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects. McGill University Library.
  14. ^ Salvage Operations of S.S. Oceana Produced by the Natural Colour Kinematograph Co., Brighton at IMDb
  15. ^ Victoria Jackson, "The Distribution and Exhibition of Kinemacolor in the UK and the USA 1909–1916" (University of Bristol, 2011).
  16. ^ "World's First Colour Film Discovered", BBC News (12 September 2012)
  17. ^ The New York Times, 2 April 1912: 24. Accessed via ProQuest ("Display Ad 28-No Title").
  18. ^ "An Expression | Details of the work | Japanese Animated Film Classics".
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