This video created by animating old photos brings alive American cities from the early 1900s
A photo based animation project put together by Russian animator Alexey Zakharov.
To see the old world brought alive, whether in films, or through archival footage of the black and white era, no matter how prosaic, is a continuing source of fascination in popular culture.
The video above, titled The Old New World, created by Russian photographer and animator Alexey Zakharov, brings to life old pictures of American cities, complete with horse-drawn carriages and steam engines.
The pictures of the featured cities – New York, Boston, Detroit, Washington, DC, and Baltimore are from between 1900 and 1940, and were obtained from the website Shorpy.
It’s a “photo-based animation project” that offers a “travel back in time with a little steampunk time machine,” Zakharov writes on Vimeo.
The painstaking project took a year to finish. Zakharov told the Daily Mail, “Photoshop is a lot of work when you need to cut a photo into layers and clean it up. It is not so difficult as long,” he said.
“Animation was the most difficult task for me, because I'm not a true animator like the Pixar guys... As I expected in the professional computer graphic (CG) community reaction was quite calm,” he said.
