Technicolour

Technicolor is the trademark for a series of color film processes pioneered by The Technicolor Corporation, now a division of Thomson. The Technicolor Corporation was originally founded by Dr. Herbert Kalmus in 1915. I

Technicolor is the trademark for a series of color film processes pioneered by The Technicolor Corporation, now a division of Thomson. The Technicolor Corporation was originally founded by Dr. Herbert Kalmus in 1915. It 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 Process 4 used colored filters, a beam splitter made from a thinly coated mirror inside a split-cube prism, and three strips of black-and-white film (hence the "three-strip" designation). The mirror was semitransparent, and allowed part of the light to shine straight through into a green filter and onto a strip of panchromatic black-and-white film, which registered the green part of the image. The other part of the light, reflected sideways by the mirror, went through a magenta filter to remove green light, exposed a layer of blue-sensitive orthochromatic film, passed through a red filter to remove blue light, and exposed a final layer of panchromatic film, which registered the red part of the image. The "blue" film, red dye filter, and "red" film were layered into a single "bipack" strip. The "green" film was a separate strip.