If you’ve ever seen an old color movie like The Wizard of Oz you’ve probably seen the “Filmed In Glorious Technicolor” crawl. In fact, for years, Technicolor was synonymous with seeing color on film and on your screens, and for good reasons: Technicolor was ingenious.
Despite the fact that no one had invented film stock that could actually capture color, the French company had figured out a way to make color movies by splitting the light being recorded with a prism into red, green and blue light, then recording those individual color spectrums onto separate strips of black-and-white film. Once these strips of film were colored and combined, the result was life-like color recorded on black-and-white film.
Pretty cool, huh? In the days of digital cinema, though, Technicolor has fallen on hard times. In fact, their entire company is unprofitable, with the exception of one department that keeps 220 staff on hand. It’s the patent licensing department, and their only job is to rip open new iPhones, iPads and Macs the second they come out and start looking for infringements.
