I studied photography at RIT back in the late 70s. Kodak was one of the largest employers in Rochester, along with Xerox and a few others. Back then, they owned most of the film market (we remember film, right?). It's a bit sad to see what they've become now, especially since they actually invented (but shelved) digital camera technology. Here's an amazing clip of one of the very first color motion picture film tests (from 1922). Enjoy!
From the NY Daily News, by Michael Walsh:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nati...icle-1.1259493
Pretty actresses appear rosy but pale - nearly translucent - as ethereal hues flicker across forgotten film frames, close to a century old.
As the Academy Awards approach, some cinephiles have rediscovered one of the earliest known pieces of color film while retracing the medium's history.
Sabrina Negri, a film student from Italy, preserved the early Kodachrome color film from 1922 at the Cineco Haghefilm lab in Amsterdam in 2009.
“We didn’t use any digital tools at the time. It was all photochemical,” Negri told the Daily News. “It is very painstaking work that can be a lot of fun. And the fact that the film can be seen again by an audience is exciting!”
Silent film sirens Mae Murray from "The Merry Widow" and Hope Hampton from "The Gold Diggers" - no strangers to the camera lens - lapped up the warm lighting and attention at Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, N.J.
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Mary Eaton was a famous stage actress in the 1920s and also appeared in the early sound picture “Glorifying the American Girl.” But her star started to fade in the 1930s as she turned toward alcohol, which took her life at the age of 47.
Hampton modeled outfits from "The Light and the Dark" of the same year. That film, in which she starred with Lon Chaney, was the first commercial feature to use the same color process as the test footage, according to the Fort Lee Film Commission.
Mary Eaton, a leading stage actress from the Ziegfeld Follies, joined them along with an unidentified woman and a child.
The landmark color screen test predated the first Academy Awards by seven years and the first motion picture in three-strip Technicolor, "Becky Sharp," by 13 years.
The year after Negri preserved the film, then Kodak employee Thomas Hoehn stumbled upon it at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, which houses many early tests of color treatments and film stocks.
KODAK VIA SLATE.COM
Mae Murray was called “The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips” when she rose to prominence during the silent film era. She made her film debut in “To Have and To Hold,” which is now considered a lost film.
He was mesmerized.
Hoehn said he brought the film back to Kodak where film digitization expert Kyle Alvut of the Entertainment Imaging Division scanned the film to share on the Internet.
"I knew that this little piece of footage was in good hands," Hoehn said. The historical Jazz Age images are safe in the Digital Age.
Back in the 1920s, the filmmakers were testing the Two-Color Kodachrome Process, which would soon change movie history and - in the words of Paul Simon - give us those nice bright colors.