World's First Colour Film Footage Unearthed By National Media Museum (VIDEO)

WATCH: World's First Colour Film

The world's first colour film footage has been unearthed and remastered by the National Media Museum.

The haunting reel dates from 1902, and features images of children playing in a garden, London traffic and a parrot in a cage.

The footage was made Edward Raymond Turner, who patented a technique to make colour film in 1899. He died of a heart attack four years later, and the three-colour motion process he helped invent was not a success, partly because it was so complex.

But the research was taken up by British inventor C. Albert Smith and the American Charles Urban after his death, and a two-colour system was eventually launched in 1909.

The 'Kinemacolor' camera was previously thought to be the world's first colour film system, until the new Turner footage was found.

It hasn't been viewed in decades, because it was made in an unusual 38 "and a bit" mm format.

Restoring it required a huge amount of work. Film historians and archivists Brian Pritchard and David Cleveland had to use colour filters to return colour to the film, copy it to 35mm on a specially made piece of equipment and then digitise the resulting images.

"This is the earliest natural colour film in the world, not just the UK," Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the British Film Institute, told the BBC in an interview.

"There's something about watching film in color that deceives you into believing it's more real, so to see this from 110 years ago adds something very substantial… It's really quite beautiful."

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