Colour took its time to come into acceptance in the film world. Like the Cinemascope, colour could have arrived in the 1920s, but it took another 30 years for it to be introduced.
It is important to understand that the colour in film is not the natural way colour looks in real life. In the early films, a lot of makeup was used to make things look more natural, strange isn't it. So, realism is constructed and it does not exist naturally when shooting it.
Colours work in that objects absorb the colour spectrum and then reflect the colours back. This is why black gets really hot in the summer and white does not.
Subtractive Colour - works on the basic principle of the represented objects (the things being filmed) absorbing different colours, 'subtracting' them from the total spectrum.
Additive Colour - involves three separate filtered film strips (shot through red, green and blue filters.) All colours are represented when these are put together. So colour is added at the exhibition stage, really.
The subtractive process is done saving economics as painting colour onto individual frames is very time consuming.
Even though colour had been associated with the cinema since 1896, it 60 more years to become legitimized. Check out this site http://simplecon.net/widefilm/ It'll tell you everything you need to know about the old colour processes.
Okay, here are some figures to show you how colour came into the world.
- 1940 - 4% of US features were produced in colour
- 1951 - It had risen to 51%
- 1958 - It had declined again to 25% because of budgeting
- 1967 - It tripled to 75%
- 1976 - It had risen to 94%
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