Time travel back 100 years to the streets of 1920s London for a glimpse of metropolitan life during the roaring twenties. Silent footage brought to 4K 60fps life and color with added sound.
It was the London of Virginia Woolf and P.G.Wodehouse. The post WW1 young aristocracy were nicknamed the ‘bright young things’ as coined by the novelist Evelyn Waugh. In 1924 the first Labour government under Ramsey McDonald was elected, reflecting a desire of the younger generation to move away from the austerity of the past. In 1928 women finally received the vote and their new liberated fashion echoed this new emancipation.
The streets, only twenty years previously full of horse and carriages, now teemed with noisy automobiles, trams and buses.
Nightlife in 1920s London was no less adventurous than in Paris, Berlin or New York. Go to spots included The Midnight Follies cabaret and the New Princes Restaurant in Piccadilly. In the West End, the Kit-Kat club on Haymarket Street was the most fashionable.
In order of appearance:
0:01 Thames
0:07 Whitehall
0:20 St Paul’s Churchyard
0:38 Park lane
0:47 Hyde Park
1:01 Waterloo
1:08 Fleet Street
1:18 Wellington Arch
1:27 Trafalgar Square
How silent footage is colorized and brought to Life
I take early fragments of silent 16fps footage and restore them to life by a combination of manual frame by frame colorization as well as the use of deep exemplar-based video colorization techniques. The footage is upscaled and the frames interpolated to a higher frame rate ( in most cases 60 frames per second.) Finally I produce a soundtrack which helps build a new immersive experience for the viewer.
Together, these processes revive old fragments of footage, offering audiences a more
vivid and engaging glimpse of lives long since lived in the distant past.
The colorization process used Deep exemplar-based Video colorization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.09909
Support my channel while treating yourself to some magically restored downloadable vintage makeup and hairstyling books from the 1920s to the 1960s – direct to your device : https://vintagemakeupguide.com/
Original footage courtesy of MIRC, University of South Carolina
