Technicolor (film company)
| Technicolor
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| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1915 |
| Reason for dissolution | 2001 takeover by Thomson 2010 takeover of the name |
| Seat | Boston , Massachusetts |
| management | Herbert T. Kalmus († 1960) Daniel F. Comstock († 1970) |
| Branch | Film industry |
Technicolor was founded in 1915 in the USA in the film technology industry, which became generally known in the 1950s to 1970s for its special processes for producing color copies for cinema films. Technicolor also developed other technical developments in film technology, such as the widescreen format Techniscope, which competes with CinemaScope . After the importance of the classic chemical color film production ended, Technicolor has become a major provider of digital cinema technology and a service provider for digital film post-production.
In 2001 Technicolor was taken over by the then electronics group Thomson, which has been called Technicolor since 2010 .
history
As a forerunner, engineers Daniel Frost Comstock , Herbert Thomas Kalmus and W. Burton Westcott founded a technical and scientific industrial consultancy under the name Kalmus, Comstock & Westcott in 1912 in Boston , Massachusetts , which initially worked for the polishing agent industry. The founders turned to cinematography when corporate attorney and investor William Coolidge commissioned the improvement of the “Vanoscope”, a flicker-free cinema projector, in 1913. They persuaded Coolidge to continue funding their interest in manufacturing processes for vivid natural color films. After looking at a few brief shots of the new camera technology, Coolidge invested $ 10,000 in trials. As a result, the Technicolor Corporation was founded on November 19, 1915 with Kalmus as President and Comstock as Vice President.
The original company name "Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation" was derived from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where Kalmus and Westcott graduates and later lecturers were and from which also the senior technical staff Leonard T. Troland and Joseph Arthur Ball came. From 1922 the company traded under the name "Technicolor Incorporated". The co-founder Herbert T. Kalmus managed it from the beginning until 1960. He died on July 11, 1963 at the age of 81.
Classic film production
Initially, Technicolor was primarily a copy company for cinema films and developed its own processes for producing color film copies. Between 1917 and 1955, five different processes based on the special dye transfer process were created. Most copies were made using this dye transfer process. Because the matrices were exchangeable between the laboratories, the negative originals could remain in the bunker if mass copies had to be made for the world market. For long copy runs, printing is more economical than copying onto chemically developed film. A copy cost 4.5 cents per foot in 1964 .
Due to its great importance for color film in the cinema, Technicolor is often regarded as the inventor of color film, although the Kinemacolor process was developed in England before 1910 .
In France, the Société Technicolor started its work in September 1955, but stopped it again in 1958. The English copier was enlarged, and the construction of an Italian Technicolor copier began in Rome, which now also took over the copying jobs for France.
Further developments by Technicolor are the Technirama widescreen process, based on the example of VistaVision in England , the Super Technirama 70 mm film developed from it and the Techniscope widescreen process introduced by Technicolor (Rome) in 1962.
Technicolor's color television copier service has existed in Hollywood since 1965, in England since 1968 and in Italy since 1969. Since these orders only involved a small number of copies, they were not produced using the dye transfer process, but on Eastmancolor print film.
For industrial films and audiovisual educational programs, Technicolor produced large print runs at low cost using the special multi-strip copying and development method. Several small film formats (Super 8 or 16 mm) were copied onto a 35 mm film strip at the same time and, after development, divided into the corresponding formats. In 1967 the "double-rank copy" was introduced. These are two 16 mm strips of film on a 35 mm film with three rows of perforations. For this purpose, the matrices have already been produced as double-rank films with the aid of optical image reduction and beam splitting. In the Super-8-Triple-Rank and Quadruple-Rank, three or four copies were located next to each other on 35 or 32 mm wide film strips.
In 1970 the Technimatte process was introduced, the merging of different foregrounds and backgrounds for special effects. In 1975 the last job for the dye transfer process was carried out in the USA, a reprint of Walt Disney's Jungle of 1000 Dangers ( Swiss Family Robinson ). After that, the factory in Hollywood was closed. In 1975 Technicolor sold the dye transfer equipment to the Beijing Film and Video Lab in China. British Technicolor Labs was still able to make dye transfer copies until 1978.
The Technicolor site in Hollywood was closed in 1977 and sold to Television Center Studios.
Change to digital technology
With the decline in the importance of the production of color film copies and the introduction of electronic film recording, Technicolor has developed into a global company in the entertainment industry and has also become a major manufacturer of video cassettes, DVD and CD-ROM in the world market.
The professional cinema projection and production technology remained the focus of the company even with the transition to digital technology. Technicolor launched its first digital cinema systems in 2001 and the first 1,000 selected cinemas were equipped with them within a relatively short period of time.
In 2003, Technicolor opened its own digital film post-production facility in New York . There is a post-processing lab and a digital color grading lab near the new facility. There, among other things, the films were The Wizard of Oz ( The Wizard of Oz ), Rear Window ( Rear Window ), Funny Girl and Apocalypse Now Redux revised and republished with better image quality. Since 2004, Technicolor has had eleven film laboratories and more than twice as many post-production facilities in various locations around the world. Technicolor not only works for well-known film studios such as DreamWorks SKG , Paramount Pictures , Sony Pictures Entertainment , 20th Century Fox , The Walt Disney Company and Warner Bros. Pictures , but also for game and software manufacturers such as Microsoft , Electronic Arts and Atari .
Takeover by Thomson
With the turn to digital media and at the same time as the introduction of digital cinema systems, the original Technicolor Corp. in 2001 finally became self-employed and was taken over by the then electronics group Thomson. This in turn transferred the name of the acquired subsidiary Technicolor to the entire group in 2010 .
literature
- Joachim Polzer (Ed.): The rise and fall of the sound film. The future of cinema: 24p? (= World wonder of cinematography. Contributions to a cultural history of media technology . No. 6 ). Polzer Media Group, Potsdam 2002, ISBN 3-934535-20-8 (with a longer article by Gert Koshofer about Eastman Kodak and Technicolor).
- Paul Read: A Short History of Cinema Film Post-Production (1896-2006) . In: Joachim Polzer (Hrsg.): Zur Geschichte des Filmkopierwerk (= world wonder of cinematography. Contributions to a cultural history of media technology . No. 8 ). Polzer Media Group, Potsdam 2006, ISBN 3-934535-26-7 (English).
- Gert Koshofer: 90 years of Technicolor . In: Joachim Polzer (Hrsg.): Zur Geschichte des Filmkopierwerk (= world wonder of cinematography. Contributions to a cultural history of media technology . No. 8 ). Polzer Media Group, Potsdam 2006, ISBN 3-934535-26-7 .
- Herbert T. Kalmus, Eleanore King Kalmus: Mr. Technicolor . 1st edition. MagicImage Filmbooks, Absecon (NJ) 1993, ISBN 1-882127-31-5 (English).
- Fred E. Basten: Glorious Technicolor. The Movies' Magic Colors . AS Barnes and Co., Cranburry (NJ) 1980, ISBN 0-498-02317-6 (English, an expanded and updated new edition was published in 2005).
- Gert Koshofer: Color. The colors of the film . Wissenschaftsverlag Volker Spiess, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-89166-054-5 .
- Robert Koziol: A Chronicle of the Color Cinema . In: TV and film technical college . June 1972, ISSN 0015-1424 (series from June 1972 to June 1974; Robert Koziol is a pseudonym of Gert Koshofer ).
- Johannes Binotto : Supernatural Color. About Technicolor and its aesthetics . In: Filmbulletin . No. 6.12 , September 2012, ISSN 0257-7852 , p. 33–39 ( text on the author's website [accessed August 1, 2016]).
