Claude Friese-Greene

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Claude Friese-Greene (3 May 1898 – 1943), British-born cinema technician and filmmaker, and notably most famous for his 1926 collection of films entitled The Open Road.

Friese-Greene's father William Friese-Greene was a pioneer in early cinematogrpahy and began the development of a colour film process called Biocolour. This process produced the illusion of true colour by exposing each alternate frame of ordinary black and white film stock through a 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 it suffered from noticeable flickering and red and green fringing when the subject was in rapid motion. In an attempt to overcome the colour fringing problem a faster-than-usual frame rate was used.

George Albert Smith and Charles Urban filed a lawsuit against William, claiming that the Biocolour process infringed upon Smith's Kinemacolor patents. William won the first round, but in 1914 the House of Lords reversed the previous decision in favor of Smith and Urban. This meant that William Friese-Greene was unable to exploit the Biocolour system to its full potential. After William's death in 1921, Claude Friese-Greene continued to develop the system during the 1920s.

In 2006 the BBC ran a series of programmes called The Lost World of Friese-Greene, presented by Dan Cruickshank about Claude Friese-Greene's 1920s road trip from Land's End to John o' Groats, which he filmed using the Biocolour process. The original print of Claude's film was subjected to computer enhancement by the British Film Institute to remove the flickering problem.