Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

Get Adobe Flash player

Black Narcissus (1947), dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger,
cinematography by Jack Cardiff.

The glade is plaster bamboos set in a studio in England six miles from Windsor Castle. The “moonlight” is a bank of electric lamps flooding down 800-footcandles of light before a Technicolor camera shooting at F2.8. The eye sees it as dreamy and erotic, but is there a word for the color of that dress? Plum? Maroon? Ruby? But Beneath the flotsam of words flows the river of feeling that is color in movies.

Still color systems—such as the Lumiere's Autochrome—preceeded Technicolor, as did moving picture methods such as tinting, toning, and stencilling.

Consider Jean Simmons in Black & White and in Color, Annabelle's Serpentine Dance, tinting and toning, and the Natalie Kalmus touch in 3-color Technicolor movies. Black & white leads to dreamland, but consider how color ripples open the world.
 
Read it. Learn it. Do it.
Anna May Wong, The Toll of the Sea
Two-strip Technicolor
La Cucaracha Technicolor
Three-strip Technicolor

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

Get Adobe Flash player

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

Get Adobe Flash player
An Elephant Walks. Eadweard Muybridge, Photographs for Animal Locomotion (1887) animated 2012.

“Technicolor has demonstrated through the years its complete and absolute integrity and pride of craftsmanship about every single print that comes out of its laboratories in Hollywood and in England…”


            David O. Selznick September 23, 1949

You Did It Then: Strike a virtual answer print of shots from a scene of Black Narcissus. Where necessary, time the shots to normalize exposure levels. Evoke from the film stock the look that's right for this film. Strike a gray scale print, too. Step-by-step instructions and the files you can use are here.
 
Amélie, color correction
Digital color correction software now radically expands the filmmaker's palette. Consider these shots.
You Do It Now: Play with the color of one of your Make Film History movies. Modify brightness, contrast, saturation, red, green, and blue gain, and anything else you can control. Go crazy. See how much you can change.