A two-color additive process invented by Albert George Hillman in the United Kingdom.
Film Explorer
Identification
Unknown
Each frame was four perforations tall, however, two frames were exposed simultaneously, so the film was advanced eight perforations between each exposure.
B/W
Unknown
1
Each frame of B/W film was simultaneously exposed twice through a red and a green filter (Wratten 28 and 40A respectively). These color records were recombined on screen by projecting the B/W film through similar color filters. As this was a two-color process, only a restricted part of the spectrum could be reproduced.
Unknown
Unknown
Each frame was four perforations tall, however, two frames were exposed simultaneously, so the film was advanced eight perforations between each exposure.
B/W, Kodak Super Sensitive Panchromatic film.
Likely British Eastman Kodak markings.
History
While it was never commercially exploited, Hillman Colour is nevertheless an interesting footnote in the history of colour cinematography in Britain. At the fifth annual general meeting of Gerrard Wire Tying Machines Co. Ltd, part of Gerrard Industries, held in July 1930, Chairman Kay Harrison announced to the shareholders that Gerrard had acquired world rights — excluding the USA and Canada — for a new process for printing colour images on paper at great speed. The system was known as Colourgravure and to exploit it a subsidiary of Gerrard, known as Colourgravure Ltd, was set up. In announcing this development, Harrison noted that the process was to be used for the printing of packing labels but that 'the process will involve revolutionary changes in other directions from which the company should derive considerable benefit'. One of those 'other directions' was the acquisition and development of patents in an additive process which was being developed by Albert George Hillman, known as the Hillman process. Hillman had previously worked on Cinecolor with Demetre Daponte and Sydney Cox.
In 1934 meetings began between Gerrard Industries and Alexander Korda of London Film Productions, at that time Britain's most celebrated production company thanks to the success of The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), to discuss the possibility of London Films using the Hillman process. These negotiations were probably prompted by the Prudential, who had a stake in both Gerrard and London Films. In December 1934 it was agreed that London Films would assist with the development of the Hillman process.
Testing of the process took place in the early part of 1935, but it was evident that it was not yet ready for commercial exploitation, while simultaneously in America the first three-strip Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp (1935), was in production. According to Charles Drazin, after successful previews of Becky Sharp, Technicolor founder Herbert Kalmus came to Britain to sell the process and began negotiations with a financier, Sir Adrian Baillie, out of which came a British production company, Tower Films, which was to make only Technicolor films. The fact that Korda's American distributor and partner, United Artists, agreed to distribute Tower Films' output prompted Korda to join the negotiations around this already-proven process. Gerrard Industries were also involved, with Kay Harrison set to become managing director of Technicolor Ltd, so with both major developers now aligned with Technicolor, the Hillman process faded away at the end of 1935.
[Reprinted from Brown, Simon (2012). “Technical Appendix”, pp. 274-275. In Sarah Street (ed.), Color Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.]
Technology
In the Hillman process, two frames were taken simultaneously through two lenses, one above the other. This was done through the use of two mirrors before the two lenses. The light hit the upper mirror which was perforated, allowing some of the light through to the upper lens, and reflecting the rest of the light down to the lower mirror, which was angled to direct the light onto the lower lens. The frames were taken through an oscillating filter containing three filter elements: red, green and red. Two frames were exposed, one through the red filter and one through the green, and then the film moved on one frame, as did the filter, so that the same frame was exposed through its filter twice, once in the upper gate, once in the lower. By this method a red frame would be exposed through the red filter in the upper gate, then moved on one frame with the filter to be exposed again through the red filter in the lower gate. At the same time, a new unexposed frame would be exposed through the green filter in the upper gate, before being moved on to the lower gate to be exposed again. As reported by Cornwell-Clyne, the shutter on the camera moved in the opposite direction, so the second exposure of each frame effectively began before the first exposure of the following frame. The aim of this was to reduce the time between the exposure of each frame and thus reduce fringing.
[Reprinted from Brown, Simon (2012). “Technical Appendix”, pp. 274-275. In Sarah Street (ed.), Color Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.]
Two frames were taken simultaneously through two lenses. The beams of light from these lenses were redirected onto the film via mirrors. Standard two-colour Wratten filters #28 (red) and #40A (green) were used to capture the colour records onto Eastman Kodak Super Sensitive Panchromatic B/W film.
Hillman, Albert George. Production of Cinematographic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 414,059, filed May 13, 1933 and issued July 23, 1934.
An oscillating filter was used in both the camera and projector. Each pair of neighbouring frames was recorded and projected simultaneously through green and red filters. The film was then advanced by one frame and a second exposure was made or projected using the same filter colour. This was an attempt to reduce flicker.
Hillman, Albert George, George Harmer Johnson, Colourgravure Limited. 1933. Production of Cinematic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 414,059. Filed Jan. 21, 1933; granted July 23, 1934.
References
Anon. (1930). “Gerrard Colourgravure”. The British Journal of Photography, 77:8 (August): p. 482.
Anon. (1931). “The Hillman Colour Camera”. The British Journal of Photography, 78:12 (December): pp. 47–68.
Anon. (1935). “System Demonstrated”. Kinematograph Year Book, 22. London : Kinematograph Publications Ltd.: p. 259.
Anon. (1935). Today’s Cinema, September 23: p. 1.
Cornwell-Clyne, Klein (1940). Colour Cinematography. Boston: American Photographic Pub. Co., pp. 157–9, 301–2.
Cornell-Clyne, Adrian (1951). Colour Cinematography (3rd edn.). London: Chapman & Hall, pp. 275–6, 556–9.
Drazin, Charles (2010). “Korda, Technicolor and the Zeitgeist’. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 7:1 (April): pp. 5–20.
Spencer D. A. (1935). “The Progress in Colour Photography”. The Photographic Journal, 75: p. 199.
Patents
Hillman, Albert George, Bertram Thomas Gill, Gerrard Wire Tying Machines Company Limited. 1930. Improvements in Optical Systems for Cameras and Photography or Kinematography particularly in Colour. British Patent 357,660, filed July 4, 1930; granted Oct. 1, 1931.
Hillman, Albert George, Colourgravure Limited. 1932. Improvements in Optical Systems for Cameras and Photography or Kinematography particularly in Colour. British Patent 404,307, filed April 12, 1932; granted Jan. 12, 1934.
Hillman, Albert George, George Harmer Johnson, Colourgravure Limited. 1933. Production of Cinematic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 414,059. Filed Jan. 21, 1933; granted July 23, 1934.
Hillman, Albert George, George Harmer Johnson, Colourgravure Limited. 1933. Production of Cinematic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 414,065. Filed Jan. 21, 1933; granted July 23, 1934.
Hillman, Albert George, George Harmer Johnson, Colourgravure Limited. 1933. Production of Cinematic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 434,719. Filed Dec. 8, 1933; granted Sept. 9, 1935.
Hillman, Albert George, George Harmer Johnson. 1936. Production of Cinematic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 478,501. Filed April 17, 1936; granted Jan. 17, 1938.
Hillman, Albert George, George Harmer Johnson. 1936. Production of Cinematic Effects in Colour and Means therefor. British Patent 483,817. Filed July 25, 1936; granted April 25, 1938.
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Authors
Simon Brown is Associate Professor of Film and Television at Kingston University, London, UK. He has written extensively on many aspects of film history and technology – including early, silent and British cinema, 3D and colour cinematography. His publications include the monograph Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of the British Film Industry 1899–1911 (University of Exeter Press, 2016) a Technical Appendix on colour film processes in Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–1955 by Sarah Street (BFI Publishing, 2012) and the online article “Dufaycolor: The Spectacle of Reality and British National Cinema” (2002) – available at http://www.bftv.ac.uk/projects/dufaycolor.htm.
Oleksandr Teliuk is a film scholar, archivist and artist. As a film archivist and programmer, he worked at the Dovzhenko Center, Ukrainian State Film Archive. He was co-curator of film programmes and exhibitions at the Film Museum of Dovzhenko Center, including “VUFKU: Lost & Found” (2019); co-editor of books (Cinematographic Revision of Donbas [2017, 2018], Chornobyl (In)Visible [2017] and Ukrainian Film Critic Anthology of the 1920s [2018—2022]); curator of numerous film programmes of Ukrainian archival cinema at international film festivals. He is a graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation (2024).
The History, Technology and References sections are written by Simon Brown using text reprinted from the Technical Appendix of Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55 (2012). All other text was written or compiled by Oleksandr Teliuk.
Brown, Simon & Oleksandr Teliuk (2024). “Hillman Colour”. In James Layton (ed.), Film Atlas. www.filmatlas.com. Brussels: International Federation of Film Archives / Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum.
