NEWS
EVENTS
World’s first colour movie footage found in Bradford
Other | Thursday 13th September 2012 | Osh
The National Media Museum in Bradford found colour footage from 1902, which has been tagged the earliest colour moving images ever made.
Edward Turner can be named now the pioneer of moving color film. His footage including his three children playing with sunflowers, Brighton beach and pier, his daughter in a swing, soldiers marching in Hyde Park and London's Knightsbridge, has been dated from 1901/02 using his children’s date of birth as a reference.
So that’s how the story goes: Turner worked for American colour photographer Frederic Eugene Ives, which inspired him to put colour in moving pictures, but it was an expensive business so he got the financial support of the entrepreneur Frederick Lee. But Lee started losing interest for the slow progress, and Turner went to Charles Urban to request assistance in developing the patent, in return for exploitation rights. Urban was instantly enthusiastic, but suddenly Turner died of a heart attack in 1903 at the age of 29, leaving his invention unfinished. So Urban managed to develop this project by getting associated with G.A. Smith, who thought the process was unworkable and, in 1909, successfully launched the two-colour Kinemacolor system instead. So Turner’s invention was regarded in cinema’s history as a practical failure to get to Kinemacolor, until recently Michael Harvey, Curator of Cinematography at the National Media Museum, rediscover this footage which was forgotten in the archive, discovering that their procedure actually worked.
Paul Goodman, museum's head of collections, said: "We believe this will literally rewrite film history" Adding: "I don't think it is an overstatement. These are the world's first color moving images." The footage will be shown to the public from 13th September at the museum in Bradford. And a BBC documentary, The Race for Colour, will be broadcast on 17 September in the Yorkshire and south-east regions.
Check the restoring process in the video below.
By Laura Vila and Shavy Malhotra
