Technicolor Camera

The Technicolor camera transformed the film industry by acting as the "first commercially practical, full-color motion picture process". It used a mix of red, green, and blue filters. These colors combined formed the spectrum. Because of the Technicolor camera, black and white films became increasingly rare, before fading out almost completely from Hollywood films. Just like the first "talkie", the advent of color changed the medium to what we expect to see onscreen today. The Technicolor camera was challenged once Kodak introduced a one-strip system of filming, which was much more efficient than the three-strip system that Technicolor ran. Technicolor adapted quickly, and evolved into a one-strip system as well. The images shot on Technicolor sometimes seem lurid because, in post-production, there was a process in which editors would saturate the different scenes.

Thanks to the Technicolor camera, Disney could transfer from the desaturated animations of Steamboat Willie (1928) to the bright hues seen on Snow White (1937). Citizen Kane's (1941) shadowy images had to work hard to compete with the flashy images seen on The Wizard of Oz (1939), which was released two years before. Sometimes, black and white will make a recurrence, like in the case of The Artist (2011). However, these films are seen more as artistic experiments, which speaks to the ubiquity of color in film.