Step back 100 years in time and experience the bustling life and nightlife of 1920s New York. Silent film brought to life, colorized, and upscaled in 4K at 60fps. Ready to dance the Charleston?
Using cutting-edge deep learning and meticulous hands-on artistry, we revived the real Roaring ’20s!
This time travel restoration breathes new life into the era of the jazz age and 1920s flappers in New York city.
In less than 30 years the city had transformed from quiet streets filled with horse and carriages to a metropolis packed with noisy motor cars and trams.1920s fashion, especially for women had experienced a seismic change. Short skirts had replaced the long 1900s era walking skirts. Women had cropped their hair and wore makeup – in the day time !! Corsets too were abandoned for a freer and more gamine silhouette. Boater hats and flower festooned picture hats were also gone. Now replaced with the iconic cloche hat, originally developed by Caroline Reboux, a Parisian milliner.
Key Scenes of 1920s New York in this film include:
Brooklyn Bridge and the New York skyline.
Hollywood actress Janet Gaynor arrives in New York on the S.S. Paris.
Three fashion models relaxing on a bench in Broadway.
Scenes of a small horse drawn merry-go-round. A boy uses a crank to turn the carousel.
A glimpse of a 1920s fashion show at Miller’s Store on 5th Avenue.
A group of chorus girls walking down Fifth avenue.
Staff at Saks Fifth Avenue on their lunch break.
Night time scenes around New York.
A glimpse of Broadway, with neon signs of Ziegfeld Follies and the premier of
Glorifying an American Girl. The tickets are pricey.
A post show soiree at a dance club attended by members of New York’s high society.
The Charleston Dance, featuring Bee Jackson and scenes of a speakeasy party.
Two riveters fastening steel girders together on a New York street.
An outtake from a Harlem fashion show. A rare glimpse of an African American woman on film
modelling a beaded black dress.
Easter Sunday morning outside St Patrick’s Cathedral. Everyone in their finest attire.
Cloche hats and stoles galore.
The famous Easter parade of New Yorkers dressed in their Sunday best.
A group of models pose in latest summer fashions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo New York.
A glimpse of the New York subway.
The AI 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.
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 silent black and white footage sources:
Glamourdaze Personal Collection
Original footage: By special arrangement with The Moving Image Resource Collection MIRC.
University of South Carolina:
Fifth Avenue attracts Easter paraders–outtakes. (Fox News Story C9386.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina.
Janet Gaynor–outtakes. (Fox News Story C4334.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina.
NYC scenes–outtakes.. (Fox Movietone News Story 0-203.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina.
Shoe fashions–outtakes. (Fox Movietone News Story 2-140.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina.
Chorus girls in NYC–outtakes. (Fox News Story B8972.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina.
Charleston dancing at starlight park–outtakes. (Fox News Story A7489.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina.
Harlem’s latest fashions–outtakes. (Fox Movietone News Story 4-167.) Fox Movietone News Collection. Moving Image Research Collections. University of South Carolina
