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Cinecolor was an early subtractive color-model two-color motion picture process that was based upon the Prizma system of the 1910s and 1920s and the Multicolor system of the late 1920s and the 1930s. It was developed by William T. Crispinel and Alan M. Gundelfinger, and its various formats were in use from 1932 to 1955.
As a bipack color process, the photographer loaded a standard camera with two film stocks: an orthochromatic strip dyed red and a panchromatic strip behind it. The ortho film stock recorded only blue and green, and its red filtration passed red light to the panchromatic film stock.
In the laboratory, the negatives were processed on duplitized film, and each emulsion was toned red or cyan.
Cinecolor could produce vibrant reds, oranges, blues, browns and flesh tones, but its renderings of other colors such as bright greens (rendered dark green) and purples (rendered a sort of dark magenta) were muted.
The Cinecolor process was invented in 1932 by the English-born cinematographer William Thomas Crespinel (1890–1987), [1] who joined the Kinemacolor Corporation in 1906 and went to New York in 1913 to work with Kinemacolor's American unit. [2] After that company folded in 1916, he worked for Prizma, another color film company, founded by William Van Doren Kelley. [3] He later worked for Multicolor and patented several inventions in the field of color cinematography. [4]
Crespinel founded Cinecolor, Inc. (later Cinecolor Corporation) in 1932 as a response to the success of the Technicolor Corporation, which held a partial monopoly on motion picture color. William Loss, a director of the Citizens Traction Company in New York, was its principal investor. The company bought four acres of land in Burbank, California for its processing plant. Crespinel retired as president of Cinecolor in 1948.
The company was largely founded on the patents and equipment of William Van Doren Kelley and his Prizma Color system, and was in direct competition with Multicolor, which folded in 1932, and Cinecolor then bought its equipment. Although limited in tone by comparison, Cinecolor's chief advantages over Technicolor were that color rushes were available within 24 hours, the process itself cost only 25% more than black-and-white photography (the price grew cheaper as larger amounts of Cinecolor film stock were bought), and it could be used in modified black-and-white cameras. [5]
Before 1945, Cinecolor was used almost exclusively for short films. From 1932 to 1935, Cinecolor was used in at least 22 cartoons, including Fleischer Studios cartoons for Paramount, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising for MGM; and Ub Iwerks, whose Comicolor cartoons were released by the independent distributor Pat Powers while Walt Disney held an exclusive contract with Technicolor for the use of its three-strip process for animation. [6] Among the best known animated short subjects series made in Cinecolor were Poor Cinderella , the first installment of Max Fleischer's Color Classics and Ub Iwerks' ComiColor cartoons, several 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros. Looney Tunes , many of Famous Studios' late-1940s Popeye the Sailor cartoons, and Screen Gems' Phantasies from 1947 to 1949.
The first feature-length pictures released in Cinecolor were the documentary feature Sweden, Land of the Vikings (1934) and the independently-made western The Phantom of Santa Fe (1936, but filmed in Multicolor in 1931), followed by Monogram Pictures' release The Gentleman from Arizona (1939). No other Cinecolor features followed until 1945. Lower-budgeted companies such as Monogram, Producers Releasing Corporation, and Screen Guild Productions were Cinecolor's chief employers. A 1945 PRC Cinecolor release, The Enchanted Forest , was the studio's highest-grossing film, and PRC's series of Cinecolor westerns with Eddie Dean attracted attention among exhibitors. Screen Guild's Scared to Death (1947) featured Bela Lugosi in his only color film.
The commercial and critical success of those films led both major and minor studios to use Cinecolor as a money-saving measure. The system could produce acceptable color pictures at a fraction of the cost of Technicolor such as MGM's Gallant Bess (1946), [7] Columbia's costume adventure The Gallant Blade (1948), and Eagle-Lion's Red Ryder westerns. Most features made in Cinecolor were westerns because the main color palette in those films consisted of blues, browns, and reds and so the system's limitations were less apparent.
Cinecolor was also prominently employed in processing Paramount's Popular Science series of short films although later prints were made by Consolidated Film Industries under their Magnacolor process. Hal Roach Studios made all of his postwar featurettes in Cinecolor; his was the first Hollywood studio with an all-color schedule. The last American feature released in Cinecolor was Allied Artists' Pride of the Blue Grass (1954).
Republic Pictures began using CFI's Trucolor from the end of 1946 for a variety of films ranging from Westerns, travelogues, and epics of the life of Richard Wagner ( Magic Fire ) and the battle of the Alamo ( The Last Command ). Trucolor differed, however, in that it used a dye-coupler already built into the film base, rather than the application of chemical toner.
The year 1948 was important for the Cinecolor Corp, which introduced a new supersensitive negative stock that cut back on the on-set lighting costs by 50 percent and 1,000-foot (300 m) camera film magazines. Combined, they reduced the cost of shooting in Cinecolor to only 10 percent more than black and white. [8]
The same year, Gundelfinger also developed a three-color process called SuperCinecolor but did not begin using it until 1951 with The Sword of Monte Cristo . Other films of note that used the SuperCinecolor process were Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (1952), Jack and the Beanstalk (1952), Invaders From Mars (1953), Gog (1954), and Top Banana (1954). The latter two were both also filmed in 3-D.
SuperCinecolor used black-and-white separations produced from monopack color negatives made with Ansco/Agfa, DuPont, Kodachrome, or Eastmancolor film, for principal photography. After the negative was edited, it was copied through color filters into three black-and-white negatives. An oddity of the system was that rather than using cyan, magenta, and yellow primary subtractive colors, SuperCinecolor printed its films with red, blue and yellow matrices to create a system that was compatible with the previous printers. [9] [ dubious ] The result of the combination of the color spectra was an oddly-striking look to the final print.
Printing SuperCinecolor was not a difficult process, as it was engineered to use the old process' equipment. Using duplitized stock, one side contained a silver emulsion toned red-magenta and, on the other side, cyan-blue. A yellow layer was added on the blue side by imbibition. [10] The soundtrack was subsequently applied on the blue-yellow side in a blue soundtrack but separate from those records. The final prints had vivid dyes that did not fade and were of acceptable grain structure and sharp in focus. The common perception of Cinecolor prints being grainy and not easily focused is perpetuated by 16 mm, regular-process Cinecolor prints in which those elements are an issue.[ citation needed ]
Cinecolor Corp. operated at a net loss from 1950 to 1954, partly because the weak financial position of its division in England made it necessary for the parent company to refinance it and partly because of its own operating losses. [11] [12] Donner Corporation, a private investment organization, acquired Cinecolor Corp. in June 1952. [13] In 1953, it became the Color Corporation of America, specialized in SuperCinecolor printing, and was a major Anscocolor processor. It also made Eastmancolor prints and did commercial film processing and printing of non-theatrical films, and black-and-white film processing for television. To stimulate its theatrical film business, Color Corp. financed independent movie producers. [13] The last theatrical feature with a SuperCinecolor credit was The Diamond Queen, released by Warner Bros. in November 1953. Thereafter, "Color by Color Corp. of America" was used for films like Shark River (1953) and Top Banana (1954).
Color Corporation of America was bought out on April 8, 1954 by Houston Color Film Laboratories, which processed Anscocolor at its plant in Los Angeles, and Houston Fearless Corp., which made processing and developing equipment. [14] It became strictly an Anscocolor processor. Color Corp. sold its film processing laboratory in mid-1955 to provide its television and motion picture equipment-making division a laboratory in which to test its equipment, [12] and the corporation was dissolved. [15]
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
Ubbe Ert Iwwerks, known as Ub Iwerks, was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Iwerks grew up with a contentious relationship with his father, who abandoned him as a child. Iwerks met fellow artist Walt Disney while working at a Kansas City art studio in 1919. After briefly working as illustrators for a local newspaper company, Disney and Iwerks ventured into animation together. Iwerks joined Disney as chief animator on the Laugh-O-Gram shorts series beginning in 1922, but a studio bankruptcy would cause Disney to relocate to Los Angeles in 1923. In the new studio, Iwerks continued to work with Disney on the Alice Comedies as well as the creation of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit character. Following the first Oswald short, both Universal Pictures and the Winkler Pictures production company insisted that the Oswald character be redesigned. At the insistence of Disney, Iwerks designed a number of new characters for the studio, including designs that would be used for Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar.
The golden age of American animation was a period in the history of U.S. animation that began with the popularization of sound cartoons in 1928 and gradually ended in the late 1960s, where theatrical animated shorts began losing popularity to the newer medium of television animation, produced on cheaper budgets and in a more limited animation style by companies such as Hanna-Barbera, UPA, Jay Ward Productions, and DePatie-Freleng.
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Flip the Frog is an animated cartoon character created by American animator Ub Iwerks. He starred in a series of cartoons produced by Celebrity Pictures and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1933. The series had many recurring characters besides Flip; including Flip's dog, the mule Orace, and a dizzy neighborhood spinster.
An RG color model is a dichromatic color model represented by red and green primary colors. The name of the pair of models comes from the initials of the two primary colors: red and green. The model may be either additive or subtractive. The primaries are added together in varying proportions to reproduce a linear gamut of colors, which can reproduce only a fraction of the colors possible with a trichromatic color space, such as for human color vision.
The ComiColor Cartoon series is a series of 25 animated short subjects produced by Ub Iwerks from 1933 to 1936. The series was the last produced by Iwerks Studio; after losing distributor Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1934, the Iwerks studio's senior company Celebrity Pictures had to distribute the films itself. The series was shot exclusively in Cinecolor.
Color Classics are a series of animated short films produced by Fleischer Studios for Paramount Pictures from 1934 to 1941 as a competitor to Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies. As the name implies, all of the shorts were made in color format, with the first entry of the series, Poor Cinderella (1934), being the first color cartoon produced by the Fleischer studio. There were 36 shorts produced in this series.
U.M. & M. TV Corporation was an American media company best known as the original purchaser of the pre-October 1950 short films and cartoons produced by Paramount Pictures, excluding Popeye and Superman. The initials stand for United Film Service, MTA TV of New Orleans, and Minot T.V.
Film tinting is the process of adding color to black-and-white film, usually by means of soaking the film in dye and staining the film emulsion. The effect is that all of the light shining through is filtered, so that what would be white light becomes light of some color.
Multicolor is a subtractive two-color motion picture process. Multicolor, introduced to the motion picture industry in 1929, was based on the earlier Prizma Color process, and was the forerunner of Cinecolor.
In cinematography, bipacking, or a bipack, is the process of loading two reels of film into a camera, so that they both pass through the camera gate together. It was used both for in-camera effects and as an early subtractive colour process.
Color motion picture film refers both to unexposed color photographic film in a format suitable for use in a motion picture camera, and to finished motion picture film, ready for use in a projector, which bears images in color.
Trucolor was a color motion picture process used and owned by the Consolidated Film Industries division of Republic Pictures. It was introduced as a replacement for Consolidated's own Magnacolor process.
Duplitized film was a type of motion picture print film stock used for some two-color natural color processes. It was introduced by Eastman Kodak around 1913. The stock was of standard gauge and thickness, but it had a photographic emulsion coated on both sides of the film base instead of on one surface only.
The Prizma Color system was a color motion picture process, invented in 1913 by William Van Doren Kelley and Charles Raleigh. Initially, it was a two-color additive color system, similar to its predecessor, Kinemacolor. However, Kelley eventually transformed Prizma into a bi-pack color system that itself became the predecessor for future color processes such as Multicolor and Cinecolor.
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Technicolor is a series of color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades.