World’s oldest colour movie discovered, about animals

This video from Britain says about itself:

One of the earliest successful attempts at film in natural colours, made probably by William Norman Lascelles Davidson and Benjamin Jumeaux in Brighton, 1902 or 1903. Three separate images were photographed simultaneously through colour filters (red, green and blue).

From Big News Network:

World’s 1st moving colour picture reveals animal movie stars

Thursday 13th September, 2012

Rolls of film found in a museum in UK dated to 1901 or 1902 making them the earliest colour movies in existence, have made a vivid macaw and a goldfish some of the world’s first movie stars.

The moving pictures, which were found in the National Media Museum in Bradford, UK, were produced by photographer Edward Turner using a technique that is regarded by film historians as a practical failure.

Successive frames were recorded on film through red, green and blue filters so that later the sets of three images could be projected through similar filters to recreate the original colours, New Scientist reported.

The process, which requires a specially made camera and projector, was inspired by the colour photography technique invented by Turner’s colleague Frederic Eugene Ives.

Michael Harvey, one of the curators at the museum, worked with film archivists to restore the footage using the same method.

Since the film is black and white, they had to figure out which frames were shot through each filter to recreate the colours.

The film was then converted to 35-millimetre format by photographing each frame with an optical printer.

The restoration efforts prove that Turner’s method works, revealing a macaw and a shot of three children with a goldfish in vivid colour.

A movie premiere at the museum will allow the public to view the films for the first time in more than a century on Thursday.

(ANI)