The earliest color films, from the mid-1890s, were colored by hand, frame by frame, using tiny brushes—sometimes only a single camel hair. The work was extraordinarily labor intensive. One film-coloring workshop, run by Elisabeth Thuillier in Paris, employed approximately 200 female colorists. “I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors, and during the day, the workers applied the color according to my instructions,” Thuillier recalled in a 1929 interview. “Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often exceeded 20 colors on a film.”