Claude Friese-Greene

Claude Friese-Greene (3 May 1898 in Fulham, London – June 1943 in Islington, London) was a British-born cinema technician, filmmaker, and cinematographer, most famous for his 1926 collection of films entitled The Open Road.

Claude, born Claude Harrison Greene was the son of William Friese-Greene, a pioneer in early cinematography. He was the grandfather of musician and music producer Tim Friese-Greene.

Claude's father William began the development of an additive 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 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 colour flicker (a potentially headache-inducing defect known technically as 'colour bombardment') 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. Claude was cinematographer on more than 60 films from 1923 to 1943. He died of an accident when filming at the Denham Film Studios in June 1943.

In 2006, the BBC ran a series of programmes called The Lost World of Friese-Greene. The series, presented by Dan Cruickshank, included The Open Road, Claude Friese-Greene's film of his 1920s road trip from Land's End to John o' Groats. The Open Road was filmed using the Biocolour process, and the British Film Institute had to use computer processing of the images to suppress the colour flicker and remove the red and green fringes around rapidly moving objects.

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