I've been moving more and more each day towards a 'niche' of old school photography and film in my work. (There's some serious private collectors out there!)
Well I had a guy that's seriously into Kustom Kulture and collects old vintage cars and stuff. He asked me for a price on shooting something in glorious Technicolor. So I started to research the process and it just blew me away! My conclusion is that I can't do it and if I could the cost would be huge.
But just the same here's how the IB Technicolor process is done :
Quote:
It is referred to as "three-strip" Technicolor because it utilized a custom-made camera which actually ran three separate strips of film through it at the same time. The camera was so noisy that it required a huge "blimp" (sound-proof housing) and the actual camera plus the blimp weighed a ton (figuratively speaking). It is this huge square blimp that you see in the on-the-set production stills from classic Technicolor films.
BUT the actual film that ran through this camera was NOT color film at all! It was three strips of black and white film each of which was exposed through a different colored filter (red, blue, and green). This produced a black-and-white record of each color. (I won't go into a lot of color theory here.)
THEN, these black-and-white camera negatives were used to make what were called "imbibition matrices" which could be made to absorb differing amounts of the complementary colors (cyan, yellow, and magenta). These matrices were soaked in the proper color and then used to make the positive print by adding, one on top of the other, the cyan, yellow, and magenta. (Much like your newspaper prints a color photograph today--three colors added on top of each other to make the final full-color copy).
Actually, the three colors were laid down over a faint black-and-white positive "key" image. It was this, in addition to the imbibition process itself, which gave Technicolor it's characteristic richness
|