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Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914. It was invented by George Albert Smith of Brighton, England in 1906, and launched by Charles Urban's Urban Trading Co. of London in 1908. From 1909 on, the process was known as Kinemacolor. It was a two-colour additive colour process, photographing and projecting a black-and-white film behind alternating red and green filters.

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Premiere of Kinemacolor:


The first motion picture exhibited in Kinemacolor was an eight-minute short filmed in Brighton titled A Visit to the Seaside, which was trade shown in September 1908. On 26 February 1909, the general public first saw Kinemacolor in a programme of 21 short films shown at the Palace Theatre in London.

In 1910, Kinemacolor released the first dramatic film made in the process, Checkmated. The documentary film With Our King and Queen Through India (also known as The Durbar at Delhi, 1912) and the dramas The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1914), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1914) were the first feature films made in colour. Unfortunately, these latter two features were also among the last films released by Kinemacolor.

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Success and Decline of Kinemacolor


Kinemacolor projectors were eventually installed in some 300 cinemas in Britain, and 54 dramatic films were produced. Four dramatic short films were also produced by Kinemacolor in the United States in 1912–1913,[1] and one in Japan, Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura (1914).

However, the company was never a success, partly due to the expense of installing special Kinemacolor projectors in theaters. Also, the process suffered from "fringing" and "haloing" of the images, an insoluble problem as long as Kinemacolor remained a successive frame process. Kinemacolor in the U.S. became most notable for its Hollywood studio being taken over by D. W. Griffith, who also took over Kinemacolor's failed plans to film Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, which eventually became The Birth of a Nation (1915).

The first (additive) version of Prizma Color, developed by William Van Doren Kelley in the U.S. from 1913 to 1917, used some of the same principles as Kinemacolor. In the U.K., William Friese-Greene developed another additive colour system for film called Biocolour. However, in 1914 George Albert Smith sued Friese-Greene for infringing Kinemacolor's patents, slowing the development of Biocolour by Friese-Greene and his son Claude in the 1920s.

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List of Some Films Made in Kinemacolor:

The Adopted Child (1911)
Aldershot Views (1912)
All's Well That Ends Well (1914)
Alpes-Maritimes — Cascade de Courmes (1912)
The Alps (1913)
An American Invasion (1913)
The Amorous Doctor (1911)
Artillery Drill at West Point (1910)
Atlantic City (1912)
The Baby (1910)
A Balkan Episode (1911)
Band of Queen's Highlanders (1909)

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