World's first colour moving pictures discovered - 1902

[James Lougheed]

Hi all,

Not sure if this link will work for you outside of UK but thought it worthwhile to post....an amazing piece of history!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-19423951

From BBC website:
The world's first colour moving pictures dating from 1902 have been found by the National Media Museum in Bradford after lying forgotten in an old tin for 110 years. The discovery is a breakthrough in cinema history. Michael Harvey from the National Media Museum and Bryony Dixon from the British Film Institute talk about the importance of the discovery. The previous earliest colour film, using the Kinemacolour process, was thought to date from 1909 and was actually an inferior method. The newly-discovered films were made by pioneer Edward Raymond Turner from London who patented his colour process on 22 March 1899. The story of Edwardian colour cinema then moved to Brighton. Turner shot the test films in 1902 but his pioneering work ended abruptly when he died suddenly of a heart attack. Now the film has been restored by the National Media Museum and is being shown to audiences for the first time. The Race for Colour is broadcast on Monday, 17 September 2012 on BBC One South East and Yorkshire, at 19:30 BST and nationwide for seven days thereafter on the iPlayer. Note: Film archive is courtesy of the Bradford National Media Museum and The Science Museum

Cheers all!

James

 

[Clint Lealos]

Wow! That's really cool... thanks for posting.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Cool. It's often fascinating what can be found when museums and archives go digging through their collections. Lucky it wasn't discarded at some point in the past because no one was able to properly project it.

 

[James T Mather]

And with nice symmetry Red have just released a black and white 5K digital camera. The irony is so ironic you could iron it with an iron.

 

[Bill Anderson]

Hey, future proofed obsolescence. ( :

 

[Steve Gibby]

Another new article on that:

http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/13/...nd/?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000058?test=latestnews

 

[jimhare]

Thanks Steve, that clip from the museum was very informative about the process!

The only thing I don't get is why they would go to the trouble of making a 35mm print, just to scan it? Couldn't they just scan each frame on a transparency scanner and go directly to the next step?

Love the concept, and understand why it would have been almost impossible to make it practical for anything other than laboratory conditions to project!

 

[Robert Hart]

It is amazing that despite all the chances of not enduring, some things survive to be rediscovered.


One such is the first motion picture film and sound recording, which so many years after being a failed experiment was finally synced up by modern tech and some dedicated experts motivated to make it happen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaSrPUCFryU


Or the first sound recording of a human voice. Apparently this experiment was originally purposed only for graphically visualising sounds as a waveform. Then an enthusiastic modern technician devised a way of reproducing it as a sound.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBL7V3zGMUA&feature=related


One wonders how many "rediscoveries" await us. Whilst the odds are against, I hope there remain many. After all, as an Australian cinematographer discovered quite accidentally on a visit to a museum in southern europe, that the extinct Minoan civilisation "had the lens", several examples which were shown to him. This might go a long way to explaining how an ancient north African culture knew about distant astronomical bodies that only lens assisted observation would reveal. One step to photosensitisation technologies. Could it have been done before? Who knows and in what form?


Years ago as a teenager, I "contact printed" an image from a 620 B/W negative on a ripening nectarine by taping the neg onto the full sized fruit before it ripened and it coloured up. Obviously it was not an enduring record and I didn't have the wit to photograph the experiment. This was before we had a television and other modern distractions for me to spend time on. It is sad in a way that modern youth lives in a canned world where there is no need for creative imagination and less stimulus of it.

I wonder if anyone out there ever tried direct imaging onto the fruit with a fast large format lens. I doubt it would work as it takes full direct sunlight considerable time to expose the nectarine skin but who knows? There may have been a way of push-processing a nectarine skin.

Someone down at Horticultural Services at my father's employer, the Western Australian Department Of Agriculture, might have even had the answer had I bothered to ask. After all they developed the Pink Lady apple variety which american growers keenly adopted and make money out of nowadays.

I had a notion of using the method to customise images onto fruit for special occasions like special anniversaries, birthdays and weddings. The resolution was not anything to write home about and I moved on to other things. I worked out then that it would at best be a very niche novelty product for the very rich for a short time before people moved on for the next fad. So my father's grafted stone fruit tree on the west side of the house, with a halehaven peach on one branch and the nectarine on the other and I forget what he had on the third, continued producing undisturbed until the termites brought it down some fifteen years later.

I guess this tasle examples in a weird way what separates success from good notions, the drive to go the extra mile running down a hunch.

Thank goodness for mad inventors. I drive a SI2K because I cannot yet afford any sort of upgrade, the post-production path and I am generally content where I am at right now. It is perhaps not inappropriate for me on this forum to celebrate modern generation people like Ari Presler, Rob Lohman, David Newman and significant others I have neglected, for the SI2K, which broke the stagnating digital imaging mold and the self-confessed "madman" Jim Jannard for gathering a bunch of enthusiasts around him, taking it all to a new level after turning up personally over on dvinfo.net, prompting people for their wishlists and then making it happen as the RED.

One hopes he does not develop a Bransonesque enthusiasm towards spaceflight for the masses and puts the imagemaking craft on the sideboard with the sunnies. Then again, maybe we should not be selfish and instead hope that he embraces the idea.