Time travel back 125 years to the Paris Rue de l’Avenir ( streets of the future) The Paris Exposition 1900 was Belle Époque France’s celebration of the latest technology. Restored to life in 4K 60fps colour with added sound.
Over 51 million people visited the Exposition Universelle. The fair was a look back over the past century and a look forward to the coming 20th century. It was situated across five zones around the new Eiffel Tower ( built in 1887) which spanned over 500 acres This area included the banks along the Seine, the Esplanade des Invalides, the champs de Mars and the Place de la Concorde. There were some 80,000 participants. The event truly put Paris on the world map and reinforced its status as the City of Lights.
Notable features included the long winding Rue de l’Avenir (street of the future.) An electric moving walkway ( trottoir roulant) which was a major attraction. Notably absent from this ‘vision of the future’ is the motor car. Only two or three years later, the streets of Paris would be thronging with them. The horse and carriages were soon to be replaced in a much noisier 20th century to come.
The Film Restoration Process:
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 by developer Bo Chang and associates.
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/
Silent Footage Sources:
Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection. Esplanade Des Invalides. produced by White, James H. Uction United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1900. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/00694196/
Thomas A. Edison, Inc, Paper Print Collection, and Niver. Panorama from the Moving Boardwalk. produced by White, James H. Uction United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1900. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/00694265/.
Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection. Panorama of Eiffel Tower. produced by White, James H. Uction United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1900. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/00694266/
Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection. Champs de Mars. produced by White, James H. Uction United States: Edison Manufacturing Co, 1900. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/00694172/.
