The first movies were monochrome.
They had darker and lighter areas.
But early movies were not simply
black-and-white. Many were tinted.
The film was dipped in dye. Often
this was done for mood or setting.
A scene dipped in blue dye could
appear to be a night scene. Another
way early movies were colorized was
through hand coloring. Each frame
was painted to add color. All of
these methods applied color after
the film was shot. And the
color did not look natural.
At the beginning of the 1900s,
British inventor Edward Turner
created the first system to shoot
true color film. His camera used
a rotating wheel with red, green,
and blue filters. Each frame was
shot through a different filter. When
projected, three frames, each one
a different color, were shown at the
same time on top of each other.
In the early 1900s, Technicolor
Motion Picture Corporation
developed a similar
Movies Become
More Colorful
Hand-colored
film (left) compared
to Turner’s true
color film.
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