Long before Technicolor came along, the British photographer and inventor Edward Turner developed a three-color motion picture system in 1899. It was based on the mid-19th century discovery that all colors could be produced through combinations of the three primary colors — red, green and blue. And Turner’s genius was finding a way to bring this notion to moving pictures. Working with the financier Frederick Marshall Lee, Turner managed to shoot color films of children playing with sunflowers (above), a macaw perched in a cage, and goldfish swimming in a bowl. But then his films and projectors were lost … for a good century … and only recently did the National Media Museum in the UK recover the footage and then build a special projector capable of bringing the films back to the screen. To learn how they pulled it off, watch the video below. It’s pretty interesting:
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Green is not a primary color
Funny how time turns banal images haunting.
I think they were referring to the primary colours of light. When you mix red and green light it makes yellow, etc.
“Green is not a primary color”
But it *is* one of the three colours required to render an image in full colour.