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From: reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.movies
Subject: Re: First Color Films
Message-ID: <4827@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Date: Tue, 16-Apr-85 02:53:27 EST
Article-I.D.: ucla-cs.4827
Posted: Tue Apr 16 02:53:27 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 19-Apr-85 00:03:45 EST
References: <556@cornell.UUCP> <1315@yale.ARPA> <4651@ucla-cs.ARPA> <1814@zehntel.UUCP> <539@spp2.UUCP>
Reply-To: reiher@ucla-cs.UUCP (Peter Reiher)
Distribution: net
Organization: UCLA Computer Science Department
Lines: 28
Summary: 

In article <539@spp2.UUCP> urban@spp2.UUCP (Mike Urban) writes:
>
>It seems to me that I've heard that films that were actually
>shot in black and white were sometimes released in color,
>by hiring an artist to hand-tint the film.  
>How
>could they possibly release more than one or two prints this way?
>
Hand painting came in two flavors: tinting and toning.  In tinting, some
poor shmuck had to individually apply color to individual frames of the
negative after exposure.  Toning merely required dumping the whole negative
in a bath of dye.  In rare cases, tinting was done to the level of applying
individual colors to objects in the film.  In most cases, the entire frame
was tinted with one or two colors, the latter providing some modestly
interesting contrasts.  Toning was invariably single color.  Once the
color was on the negative (by applying dye/paint/whatever-it-was to it),
apparently there were processes to transfer the color to the prints.
(I wouldn't swear that the dyes were applied to negatives rather than
prints, but my sketchy references suggest this.)

Since I bothered to look the subject up, yes, Anna Mae Wong's 1922 "The
Toll of the Sea" was the first Technicolor film (two strip), and the
first three strip Technicolor short was "La Cucaracha" in 1933, not
"Flowers and Trees" (at least if Katz's "Film Encyclopedia" is to be believed.)
-- 
        			Peter Reiher
        			reiher@ucla-cs.arpa
        			{...ihnp4,ucbvax,sdcrdcf}!ucla-cs!reiher