Before WW1 - Seaside Films c.1900 Restored in 4K Color & Sound

Seaside films c.1900 opens in 1901, as a horse-drawn tram rolls along Morecambe sea front. Boys race beside it and onlookers wave at the camera. Early silent seaside films from 1898 to 1905 have been painstakingly restored and colourised in 4K, with an immersive soundscape created for each film. The journey crosses the English Channel to Étretat in Normandy, moves on to the Netherlands and then crosses the Atlantic to Long Island and Boston. 00:00 Morecambe Sea Front, 1901 00:46 Étretat, France, 1905 01:16 Morecambe, 1898 01:26 Scheveningen Boulevard, 1898 01:55 Toddlers in the Surf, Long Island, 1904 02:27 A Boating Outing, Boston, 1904 Every film here began as a flickering black and white print from archive material that has survived more than a century. Each clip has been cleaned of dirt, scratches and flicker, and the frame rate has been corrected. Hair-in-the-gate artifacts and noise were removed by masking. The footage was then upscaled to 4K, which draws out faces, hat brims, parasols and the texture of the sand. Every frame comes from original archive film, and nothing in it has been generated or invented. Colour was added with reference to period photographs and clothing from each place, and the sound was built from scratch for each film. Restoring a film this old takes many hours for each minute of screen time. The Morecambe and Étretat footage in particular needed considerable noise and hair-in-the-gate removal. Credits: Morecambe footage from the Mitchell & Ke