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Showing posts from April, 2011

The Legacy of Technicolor

This blog entry is intended for the film buffs, film historians, and cinematographers in my audience. I'd like to revisit Technicolor , or more specifically the Technicolor film process—while I'll start with a quick historical recap, I really want to talk about the visual legacy and inspiration that it has left us with and how even while rarely in actual use today, Technicolor is still very much alive, in spirit if not in fact. All of you will of course will be familiar at least to some extent with the Imbibition (or sometimes referred to as Dye Transfer ) Technicolor Process which was used on hundreds of films pretty much non-stop from the mid-1930s until the mid-70s. You'll probably also recall that the Technicolor process can be divided into three distinct "periods." The initial period, from the early 1930s until about 1953 or so, involved using a specially designed camera containing three separate film emulsions all layered and synchronized to