And It All Started With Kinemacolor

Thu 3 March 2011

And It All Started With Kinemacolor

Filed under: #satscene —— Sylvia @ 21:37

Kinemacolor was the first successful motion picture process.

Excerpt from How to Make and Operate Moving Pictures, published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1917:

…only two colour filters are used in taking the negatives and only two in projecting the positives. The camera resembles the ordinary cinematographic camera except that it runs at twice the speed, taking thirty-two images per second instead of sixteen, and it is fitted with a rotating colour filter in addition to the ordinary shutter. This filter is an aluminium skeleton wheel (Fig. 133) having four segments, two open ones, G and H; one filled in with red-dyed gelatine, E F; and the fourth containing green-dyed gelatine, A B. The camera is so geared that exposures are made alternately through the red gelatine and the green gelatine. Panchromatic film is used, and the negative is printed from in the ordinary way, and it will be understood that there is no colour in the film itself.

On the 26 February in 1909, the first Kinemacolor programme was shown to the general public at the Palace Theater in London.

The Palace Theatre opened as the “Royal English Opera House” in January 1891 and was at the time known as the Palace Theatre of Varieties.

Palace Theatre, London – Wikipedia

Denied permission by the London County Council to construct the promenade, which was such a popular feature of adult entertainment at the Empire and Alhambra theatres, the Palace compensated by featuring apparently nude women in tableaux vivants, though the concerned LCC hastened to reassure patrons that the girls who featured in these displays were actually wearing flesh toned body stockings and were not naked.

The Palace Theatre of Varieties began screening films in 1897. In 1904 the new manager employed dancers and the theatre became famous for its orchestra and the beautiful Palace Girls. Although they continue to screen films to this day, the Palace Theatre is now much more focused on musicals – somewhat of a circle back to its roots as an opera house. The West End production of Priscilla Queen of the Desert has been running at the Palace Theatre since March 2009.

And here in Twitterville, we’re in all colour, all the time. The following photographs were taken on the 26th of February in 2011, 102 years after the Kinemacolor launch: