100 Years of Technicolor

Do you remember as a kid when most of the movies included a label that said "Filmed in Technicolor?"  This is the 100th year since Technicolor was invented, and The George Eastman House has a wonderful exhibit celebrating the achievement.  The Technicolor process was one of the first methods used to shoot movies in color.  This "Two-Color camera" in production between 1921 and 1930 used the first process which involved filtering the light from a subject and capturing it in orange light and green light on the same piece of black and white film.  The color was not very saturated, and the process did not register blue colors at all.  Later the three-color camera came into being and the color was stunning.  The Three-Color cameras were amazing because they used three separate rolls of black and white film, one for recording red, one for green and one for recording blue in the scene.  The exhibit included a number of these huge cameras, as well as film clips, film stills, and all kinds of explanatory material about how the process works.  To the left of the image of the camera is a huge enlargement of a strip of the finished film, used for projection.