A Country Fair Film: Restored to Amazing Life

Time travel back 110 years to British Columbia. Hundreds of people are enjoying a day at the fair. Captured on film on the eve of WW1. Restored to life, color and sound in 4k 60fps using manual and algorithmic techniques. The fair festivities include a baby contest, a three-legged race, a wheel-barrow race, tug-o-wars, etc. Original silent footage is listed as being filmed in Victoria but was possibly filmed in the village of McBride, named after the serving premier of the time Sir Richard McBride. This is a rare glimpse into ordinary life from over 110 years ago. Note the amazing style worn by the women. Gone are the nipped in s-bend waists of the previous decade, but the corsets are still evident under their dresses. 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. Good Old Fashioned Picnic, Victoria 1914 Government of Canada. SFX: G28-21-Crowd Walla at Outdoor by craigsmith -- -- License: Creative Commons 0