South Carolina c.1902: Exposition Footage Restored to Life

Time travel back to Charleston , South Carolina in 1902 for a glimpse of the Worlds Fair. Silent footage brought to life and color n 4K 60fps. This temporary city, dubbed the Ivory City was built across 300 acres, and was a glamorous affair. The entire fake city was it up at night with the 'new' electricity.


Better remembered as the Charleston Exposition, the South Carolina West Indian Exposition was a multi-county fair and regional trade exposition held in Charleston, South Carolina from December 1, 1901 to June 20, 1902.

Behind the glamour, however was the unsavory continuation of slave labor. In this film we see the Cotton Palace. The construction of these buildings used African American prisoners or 'chain gangs' in forced labor.
The poetic justice of it all being that the organizers lost a fortune when the exhibition ended. The 675000 visitors reached only a third of the projected number.

Today all that remains is the bandstand in what is now called Hampton Park.

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 is manually done with the help of Deep exemplar-based Video colorization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.09909

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Original footage Library of Congress
Thomas A. Edison, Inc, and Paper Print Collection. Panoramic view of Charleston Exposition. United States: Thomas A. Edison, Inc, 1902. Video. https://www.loc.gov/item/00563604/.