Loading a three strip technicolor camera.

[Phillip Mosness]

Since the last films shot in this process were done in 1955, there's probably nobody alive today that was around to load the three strip cameras, but I imagine it was a bit of a challenge.

From what I understand, one of the three films was an orthochromatic for capturing the blue information that also had a red backing to pass on the red info to another panchromatic strip. 

So not only was it loading three 1000' footers but they absolutely needed to have a super organized system both  before and after to keep track of everything.

Seems like a nightmare if anything got out of order or got mislabelled (which is still true for modern film too.)

Does anyone know how they stayed on top of it all? 

 

[David Mullen ASC]

It was a blue sensitive stock dyed red with no anti-halation backing, not orthochromatic (blue + green). I had read that the green information went to ortho stock... but someone else told me that Technicolor documents said the green record was panchromatic stock (as was the red record of course).

It took long enough to load a 3-strip camera that there were always two on set, one loaded in advance when the other camera ran out. I think someone once said it took 10 minutes to reload a 3-strip camera.

Not sure when the camera was altered to be tungsten-balanced what was done about the stocks, I know the prism mirror was swapped from being gold-flecked to silver-flecked. Otherwise you'd assume that somehow the blue sensitive stock would have to be increased in speed somehow.

[Phillip Mosness]

Thanks, David.

I never thought about the color balance for panchromatic film.  Were they lighting with Carbon arcs at first? 

I'm not finding much on the editing process for three strip. 

I'm guessing they'd  cut the entire film using a black and white positive before going back to create the CMY matrices but I have no idea.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes carbon arcs were the primary lighting unit. They could also use tungsten units with blue gels, or no gels for an orange effect.

I think they made a work print for editing off of the green record.

Timing a dye transfer print was complicated because it’s not a photographic process; you controlled the density of each dye layer based on how much dye you left on.