Recreating Technicolor with 35mm Film
Introduction and basic overview of Technicolor
I had the idea to recreate the Technicolor process when I was shown a post online that basically stated how the Technicolor process was “impossible to recreate” because the knowledge was lost to time.
That’s so dumb. Whoever wrote that post, you are a moron.
Technicolor stopped being cost effective once colour film was created by Kodak. Prior to Kodak introducing Kodachrome in the mid 1930s, the Technicolor process was the only way to create images on screen in true to life colour (first in limited range dated back to 1916 then full range when they moved to three strip around 1930)
The basic idea behind Technicolor is to limit colour wavelengths hitting black and white film so you can reintroduce specific colours when the film is developed.
They did this by splitting the image coming through a camera lens and filming onto two film strips at the same time. One could capture a red spectrum and the other could capture blue and green (or a variation of the 3). This later was adapted to three film strips capturing Red, Green and Blue (RGB).
Basic Diagram of a Technicolor glass splitter by https://filmcolors.org/timeline-entry/1299/
Technicolor camera and Diagram of it’s internals
http://www.digital-intermediate.co.uk/examples/3strip/technicolor.htm
The process is no longer used due to needing 3x the amount of film you shoot on and not being entirely distinguishable from colour stock film which has individual RGB layers inside it.
My Experiment
To demonstrate the process, I took 3 photos of a print on my wall on Black and White film. For each photo I layered a colour correction gel in front of my lens so I would have the same shot but could change the sensitivity from red, to green and to blue.
Once the Film was developed, the black and white layers looked like this
Then taking the channels into After Effects we can add back the colour.
Finally, we layer each photo on top of each other and set the composition modes to “add” and we achieve a similar result to technicolor. Below is the image created by combining the three black and white photos and a comparison to the same shot from a modern digital camera, the Sony A7iii.
Combined RGB photos 35mm film
Sony A7iii
As an addition to this I wanted to test taking black and white photos just with a red filter. I took a test image of a flower outside with the filter and one without. I am going to try shoot an entire roll with this effect as I think it looks great.
