MOVIES

MOVIES

As in still photography , many attempts were made to bring color into films, before satisfactory results were achieved. One of the earlist devices photographed alternate frames through red and green filters. The prints were of the ordinary black and white kind, but with variations of intensity between adjacent frames due to the filters. The projector had an added rotary shutter with red and green sectors which were brought alternately in front of the frames. Superposed by "persistence of vision," the red and green views of the same scene showed the resultants of the complementary colors. Obviously this method was far from nature: the intensities came from the film, but the actual hues came from the shutter.

One of the earliest applications of "orthochromatic" sensitive to two different complementary colors. Photography by white light affected the two sides differently, and projection of the prints by white light blended the two colors in the same values as the original scene. Besides mechanical difficulties, this system suffered the same defect as any two color system, the range of hues reproduced with fidelity is rather narrow.

The modern technicolor system photograph the same scene through three separate filters, red, green and blue, upon three separate films, run through the camera synchronously. The three separate negatives are used to print a single positive, on which dyed relief images in all three colors are combined. The color being embodied in the print, the ordinary projector made for black and white films can be used a fact of considerable importance in popularizing color films. And the use of three colors instead of two greatly enhances the fidelity of reproduction.