Why were the early movies in black and white, what was so difficult with colours? And what are the dots on old movies?
In: Technology
A movie is in essence a long series of photographs. A photograph is simply a piece of parchment that is stained by the activity of light. The parchment reacts with light, and the light causes the parchment to develop a colour: Lots of light creates a light colour on the parchment, not very much light creates a dark colour. old-timey photography can’t capture the wavelength of light (which is what determines colour), it can only record whether or not light was present, and how much of it there was.
Colour photographs required the invention of light-sensitive chemicals that were sensitive only to a specific band of colour, rather than to all visible light. The early days of colour photography did this using three different chemicals, which were held on three different pieces of parchment, effectively meaning that you have to take the same photograph three times. Obviously, this is quite inconvenient when you need to make a movie. Colour film was technically possible long before colour movies started to be made, but it wasn’t until Kodak managed to put all three colour-sensitive chemicals onto a single parchment at the same time that you could really make these movies worth your time, and it took another 10 years after that before the technology got good enough for people to properly bother making colour films.
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