The earliest films were sometimes coloured by hand, frame by frame. A show by Robert Paul at London's Alhambra in April 1896 included an "Eastern Dancer endowed with a brilliancy of colour that results in a very striking effect." The example (right) is from a Méliès film of 1904. As films got longer it became impossible to hand-colour large numbers of prints, and in 1905 Pathé introduced stencil colouring (below). 
The print was projected frame-by-frame onto a small screen. The operator moved a pointer over the enlarged picture, outlining the areas of a particular colour. A pantograph pointer moved a cutter over another strip of film, cutting out all those areas. Up to six film stencils might be prepared, one for each colour. The stencil films were run in contact with a new print through staining machines, applying dyes of suitable colours through the holes.
Tinting (which gave an overall colour to a whole scene) and toning (chemically changing the tones to a colour, but leaving the highlights white) could also be used to add colour effects. 'Natural' colour arrived commercially in 1909 when Kinemacolor was shown at the Palace Theatre of Varieties in London in February, at the Folies Bergeres in Paris in April 1909, in Berlin Garden in the autumn of 1909, and at Madison Square Gardens, New York, in December. Financed and promoted by Charles Urban, and developed for Urban by George Albert Smith from earlier experiments by Lee and Turner, the system was ingenious and successful.
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TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT : SOUND |
The camera was fitted with a rotating wheel of red and green filters, and alternate frames of the black-and-white filmstock were exposed to one of the two colours. The negative film was processed and printed, and the black-and-white positive shown in a projector also fitted with a filter wheel. The film was threaded so that the re-exposed frame was projected by red light, and the green-exposed frame by green light. The system operated at 32 frames per second, to enable the colours to merge. The system gave a surprisingly wide range of colour. Subjects included the Coronation procession of George V, and the Royal Durbar in Delhi, shown at London's Scala Theatre - the home of Kinemacolor for some years - in 1912. Several subjects were released each week and seen in twelve other countries. A legal setback for Kinemacolor came when a rival pointed out a technical error in the patent description, and the system finally ceased production in 1916.
