Pathécolor

Pathecolor was an early mechanical, stencil based film tinting process developed for the French film company Pathe by the filmmaker Segundo de Chomon in the early twentieth century to add color to movies that had been shot in black and white. To create it, a projected frame of film was cast onto frosted glass, and an operator traced the outlines of the areas meant to receive each color using a stylus connected to a pantograph, which cut a separate stencil film for that color for every individual frame; dye was then applied to the release prints through each stencil in a series of passes, one pass for every color used. The process did not capture color photographically at the time of filming, and instead applied selected colors onto footage that remained black and white at its source, in a manner comparable to modern digital colorization of old film.