A Visit to the Seaside

After he laid the groundwork for what became modern movie grammar from 1898-1904, exploring the uses of close-ups, long shots, and cutting, George A. Smith continued his experiments by producing and directing the first successful -- sort of -- color movie process.. He called it Kinemacolour, and from about 1908 through 1914 he produced and directed and ran the first worldwide organization making color films. Previously, color films had been produced by hand-coloring the prints, a laborious process. Then stencil methods were developed, like those for Currier & Ives prints. It was still a time-consuming and expensive process. With Kinemacolour you didn't need rooms full of young women with paint brushes. It was, given the later methods deveoped. not a particularly successful method, but it certainly was an interesting experiment andmade apparent the market for color films.

Here's Smith's first released Kinemacolour movie. Although the print I looked at doesn't seem to be of the highest quality, the process actually worked.

People are amazed that color movies were produced so early in the beginning years of cinema. The first successful color film system was rolled out in Dec. 1908 with "A Visit To The Seaside." Refined by England's George Smith, who teamed up with U.S. expat Charles Urban, the two came out with a two-color system (green and red), which consisted of a transparent spinning disc in front of the camera lens. Speeding up the camera to 32 frames per second, the innovators achieved a reasonable degree of success in capturing color on the basic black and white film stock. The series of sequences of people enjoying the beach/ocean/boardwalk of a seaside resort puts in perspective of how those in the early 1900's enjoyed a recreational summer day. Seeing the wooden posts running perpendicular to the beach with ropes hanging from them, which allowed people in the water to enjoy the refreshing ocean with, to me, was such an eye opener of delight.

The copy I've seen on "A Visit To The Seaside, " only a two-minute fragment of the eight minutes originally produced, was near breathtaking in its color vibrancy. Sure, there was two-toned blurring when people moved rapidly, but for the technology existing at the time, it is simply astonishing that filmmakers were striving to push the envelop in achieving a modicum of success for putting color on the silver screen.

Kinemacolor had limited popularity in Europe before WW1, mainly because the system required a specially-made and pretty difficult-to-operate projector, using the same two-color wheel that had to be in sync with the processed film. Once the war had destroyed most of the film studios in Europe, as well as a new color film innovation emerging, Technicolor, it was pretty much over for Kinemacolor.