JOURNEY THROUGH CAMERAS

Jul 09 2017

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Three strip Technicolor Camera.

Three inventors founded Technicolor in 1915 and developed several different processes for making color films.

At the beginning it was two strip process introduced by exposing two strips of panchromatic film in a special camera using a prism to create red and green color images.

In 1932, they turned their two-strip Process into three-strip Process and a new camera was designed by J.A.Ball. The camera was manufactured by Mitchell Corporation California.

This camera became popular and it was in use for film industry from the year 1932 to 1954.

Unlike two color system which recorded one strip of black and white negative, this new camera ran three black and white negatives simultaneously.

Inside the camera, directly behind the lens, there is the beam splitting prism, semi transparent mirror in the centre that allowed half the light to go directly to green recording and other half of the light was made to reflect 90 degrees to two film strip ‘BI PACK’

BI PACK is two negative film strip sandwiched together motion to motion in the gate. Front film was for blue record and on its motion it was red dye acted like a filter for a red record directly behind the lens.

While filming with Technicolor camera cinematographers not only rent the camera but also provided with an entire package that includes 3 camera assistants, the raw stock , color processing technical consultant.

Technicolor three strip cameras had sound proof material; the camera weighed about 227kg.

J.A.Ball won academy award for scientific achievement for designing three strip Technicolor camera in 1938.

About 29 three strip cameras were manufactured from 1933 to 1954 for live action cinematography and additionally three cameras were manufactured for high speed cinematography for slow motion shots and another 3 cameras for animation.

The process

The Technicolor three-color camera cinematography is the three primary aspects of a scene (red, green, and blue) on to three separate film strips, simultaneously.  Operating at normal speed, without fringe or parallax,in balance, and in proper register with each other.

 

These separate strips are developed to negatives of equal contrast and must always be considered and handled as a group.

 

From these color separation negatives, they print by projection through the celluloid of a specially prepared stock which is then developed and processed in such a manner as to produce positive relief images in hardened gelatine.

These three hardened gelatine reliefs are then used as printing matrices which absorb dye and then transfer this dye by imbibition printing onto another film strip, when it has received all three transfers, becomes the final completed print ·ready for projection.

 

To carry on the process of imbibitions (absorption of dye by gelatine), it is merely necessary to press the matrix film into close contact with a properly prepared blank film and hold it there for several minutes. Matrices, of course, can be used over and over again.

 

The colors of dyes used in the transfer process must be the subtractive primaries, namely, minus-red (or cyan), minus-green (magenta), and minus blue (or yellow).

 

Important films were made using the three strip Technicolor. To name a few:  Becky Sharp (1935), Wizard of Oz (1939),  Black Narcissus(1947).

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