Claude Friese-Greene

Biography

Claude Friese-Greene was a cinema technician, filmmaker and cinematographer, most famous for his 1926 collection of films entitled The Open Road (1926). Born in Fulham, London, he was the son of William Friese-Greene, a pioneer in early cinematography. Claude's father William began the development of an additive colour film process called Biocolour, which produced the illusion of true colour by exposing each alternate frame of ordinary black-and-white film stock through two different coloured filters. Each alternate frame of the monochrome print was then stained red or green. Although the projection of Biocolour prints did provide a tolerable illusion of true colour, like the more famous Kinemacolor process of George Albert Smith it suffered from noticeable colour flicker and from red-and-green fringing around anything in the scene that moved very rapidly. In an attempt to overcome these problems, a faster-than-usual frame rate was used. After William's death in 1921, Claude Friese-Greene continued to develop the system during the 1920s and renamed the process Friese-Greene Natural Colour then the Spectrum Colour Film process. Claude went on to be a highly-respected cinematographer on more than 60 films from 1923 to 1943 and a was one of the first to shoot in Technicolor in Britain. He died as the result of an accident when filming at the Denham Film Studios in January 1943.