The First Moving Pictures in Colour

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Restoring a colourful past.

For the first time in over a hundred years, the National Media Museum has restored for viewing, colour film dating back to 1902. The film has undergone a painstaking restoration process, including its conversion into a playable format.

The film was originally captured through the use of sequential red, blue and green filters and so film archive experts have had to reconstruct the colour footage via the precise methods set out in the original 1899 patent of the technology.

With help from the BFI National Archive, the film has now been digitised for everyone to view, providing a vivid glimpse at the past, like nothing seen before.