I think the reason a lot of people think The Wizard of Oz was the first color movie, or at least, the first live-action feature-length color movie, was because the two most famous early color live-action movies are Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. They were both released in 1939 but The Wizard of Oz was released a few months before Gone with the Wind. Plus The Wizard of Oz starts out in black and white (with a sepia tone tint to it) and then transitions to color when Dorothy arrives in the Land of Oz, which some people see as a metaphor for the technological transition from black and white to color movies in general.
Color photography is very old, but the hard part was coming up with a practical way of doing it, which was hard enough for still photography, and even harder for motion picture photography.
You can replicate the basic principle of early color photography processes easily these days if you have a camera with ordinary black and white film (or a digital camera that can be set to take black and white pictures, which makes it even easier), and a computer with a good photo editing program like Adobe Photoshop.
Put the camera on a tripod or some other stable thing so it won't move at all and point it at a stationary object that you want to photograph. Place a red filter in front of the lens and take a picture. Then without moving the camera nor the object you are photographing, take another picture with a green filter in front of the lens instead of a red filter. Then do that again with a blue filter. Now you have three B&W pictures of the same object, but they aren't ordinary B&W pictures.
The red filter only allowed red light to expose the film in the first picture, so you can think of it as being encoded for where the red color information belongs, and the same concept applies to the other two pictures. Then you can open all three pictures in Photoshop, assign the first picture to the red channel, the second picture to the green channel, and the third picture to the blue channel. With the three channels visible you will have a full color picture, and the colors will be true to the source.
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samoanjoes (55109)
a month ago
Now I have to check "Becky Sharp" out. I always try to watch all the firsts in films. I saw "The Jazz Singer" to watch the first film with sound. Please don't tell me that another movie is the first for sound.
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MaximRecoil (4515)
a month ago
Keep in mind that Becky Sharp was only the first feature-length live-action movie to use the three-strip Technicolor process (which is the same process as The Wizard of Oz used, and in my opinion, the best looking color process ever), not the first one to use a natural color process of any kind.
It may be the first feature-length live-action movie that was shot entirely in full-range color though, because the three-strip Technicolor process has a full color range (i.e., the entire red-green-blue spectrum, which covers every possible color), whereas most earlier processes only had a limited color range, e.g., red-green spectrum for earlier versions of Technicolor.
"Please don't tell me that another movie is the first for sound."
It is first for sound (with some qualifications), as far as I know.
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samoanjoes (55109)
a month ago
I don't care about shorts too much, but I'm totally down for a full feature length colour film in any extent.
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MaximRecoil (4515)
a month ago
It can be difficult to determine the "first" of something. With movies you need a string of qualifiers such as live-action or animated, short or feature-length, documentary or fictional narrative, all/mostly in color or just a few segments in color, natural color or artificial color, full-range color spectrum or limited color spectrum, movies that are at least somewhat well-known or obscure and completely lost movies too?
There is this from 1911 which is claimed to be "the first feature-length film in natural color":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Delhi_Durbar_1911.webm
But it's a silent documentary and it used the Kinemacolor process, which has a limited color spectrum.
There is The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1914), which is a fictional narrative type movie, but it's only 50 minutes long. Is that a short or not? It's longer than most shorts but it's shorter than what's currently considered feature-length. It's also a "lost" film, and also used the limited-range Kinemacolor process.
And so on.
Becky Sharp is definitely the first [insert some qualifiers here] movie that used a really, really good color process (three-strip Technicolor). There was some earlier stuff that also used the same color process, dating back to 1932, but they were either shorts or segments within a mostly B&W movie.
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samoanjoes (55109)
a month ago
Yeah, there's definitely debate here. There's a lot of back-and-forth about the film "Sherlock Jr." about whether or not it counts as a feature film. IMDb keeps putting it on and taking it off their top 250 list because of it.
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