Priceless! Thank you for this film. I love these vintage films. Can't resist saying that this production reminds me of those I LOVE LUCY episodes when Lucy, Ricky and the Mertzes performed in one those community or little Ricky's school theatrical' productions. Thanks for uploading this.
Astonishing to think this film is now 110 years old! I'll bet the players and producers never realised it would be seen over so many years! Thanks for posting !! 😍😍😍
The Edison recording process was inherently more sensitive than the ordinary lateral process. An acoustically recorded sound track was extraordinary but well within the capabilities of Edison technology.
The Flugrath sisters. Viola Dana & Shirley Mason were stage names, & with Edna were Virginia & Leonnie Flugrath, Made loads of films in silent days, & all were quite tiny, under 5 feet tall. Shirley Mason 'Queen of the Fairies' was the youngest aged around 12 here, even though Edna was the eldest at 20, all look a similar age.
There were actually several reason why hollywood didn't adapt to sound until the Last 1920s,these include: -the sound was to quiet for an average 250-1000 person theater -studios had to rebuild their studios to have electricity -they had to get New actors that could perform in sound pictures Too much of a cost to make it worth it.
There were many reasons for this. The principle one of course being cost. This 5 minute experimental picture probably cost a bomb compared to other pictures of the day, and it was designed with sound synchronisation in mind. So no expense or detail would have been soared on it. Studios would not have wanted to spend that much on each and every picture they released and in most cases would have gone bust if they tried. Even by 1927 the advent of mainstream talking pictures still came with a myriad of yet to be solved problems. Have you ever watched an early talkie from the late 20’s? Back then the sound was so sensitive that it would pick up the sound of a mouse farting and amplify it making it sound as though 50 Harley Davidsons had all starting up simultaneously. Also in the late 20’s they found that working with sound stock compared to the nitrate stock of silent films tended to distort colours and lighting. Which came with other problems to solve. Literally from 1927 onwards, it was like everybody who worked on the technical side of things, had to tear up the established rule book and solve these new problems as they went along. It was like a brand new industry where even movie veterans became newbies again. Lastly, and I think this is the most important reason why the possibilities of sound pictures was ignored and shunned for so long was that it was audience limiting and thereby sales limiting. The audience for any given picture would suddenly become limited to those who understood the language it was shot in. In the silent days, alternate language title cards were cheap to make and to edit into a film to make the product relative to any audience anywhere in the world. Anyone anywhere could watch Chaplin and Keaton and laugh at their funny antics. Anyone anywhere could watch Douglas Fairbanks, swashbuckle alone through a deck of pirates and feel the excitement. If you suddenly add 90 minutes of dialogue in language less than half of your worldwide audience understands, then you lose that audience, and by extension, ticket sales.
What they did was pre-recorded the music and the dialog, then as the actor was being shot they mouthed the sound.Played back in sync looked like they had actually recorded their voices in front of the camera.The problem besides the dis was that the sound could not be amplified loud enough for everyone in the audience to hear.
Edison had bought the rights to Daniel Higham's "friction reproducer" (previously used by Columbia in two of their cylinder machines: the BC and BM Graphophones) in order to amplify playback on the Kinetophone records.
no, that's not generally true of these 1912-1913 kinetophone films. this specific film i cannot say for a fact, but the kinetophone system is not simply a synchronous sound system of exhibition, but also one of recording; sound and image were recorded simultaneously. you can see this manifest itself in the form of the film. these were one shot films, restricted to a single, quite cramped, tableau. in 1912 this isn't necessarily the predominate style, and if these were mostly pre-recorded, one would imagine some variation in the films. some quick research could tell you this, check out the recent restorations the Library of Congress did, and if you're curious, this article could give you a (unfortunately very brief) rundown: www.jstor.org/stable/1224919
Michael Mcgee Yet they did infact have a “sound on film” process available at the time. Eugene Lauste helped with that. The reason no one backed him is because Edison had a second crack at sound films with the “sound on disc” process, of which this is an example.
Details on this film are scant, but it is unlikely that the sound was pre-recorded. It's hard to lip sync a dog barking. In addition to being an early experimental sound film, all of the audio was recorded acoustically through big horns onto a cylinder. No microphones, mixers, or vacuum tubes yet. We're likely seeing a hurried version of a touring stage musical, and the actors all were trained to really belt out their songs and lines. It was all lung power before amplification. Maybe someday we will learn who these actors were.
That was weird - an amalgamation of fairy tale characters intermingling, and a trick dog at the very end. A kind of Gilbert & Sullivan-inspired mishmash with some jokes tossed in. I expect this is the kind of thing that American audiences saw in large and small theaters as live performances on the vaudeville circuit at that time.
Do you get that this is a talking film 7 years prior to Jazz Singer? If you don't like the content, think of the historical aspect of this. The content is irrelevant.
![[60 fps] A Trip Through Paris, France in late 1890s / Un voyage à travers Paris, 1890](/img/n.gif)
Priceless! Thank you for this film. I love these vintage films. Can't resist saying that this production reminds me of those I LOVE LUCY episodes when Lucy, Ricky and the Mertzes performed in one those community or little Ricky's school theatrical' productions. Thanks for uploading this.
Just goes to show throughout history, "Everything old is new again!"
That this exists at all is just fascinating
Thank you
Thank you
Thank you sir...
Astonishing to think this film is now 110 years old! I'll bet the players and producers never realised it would be seen over so many years! Thanks for posting !! 😍😍😍
The Edison recording process was inherently more sensitive than the ordinary lateral process. An acoustically recorded sound track was extraordinary but well within the capabilities of Edison technology.
Old King Coal really pulls the whole thing together
What would these folks think of us watching their performance 110 years later? And with technology they could not even imagine.
Really fascinating to see how fluidity works. Certainly not awful on the physical side of actors.
Pretty amazing for a hundred and four year old movie
I wonder how they managed this running time
Thank you sir.
Thank god.
The Flugrath sisters. Viola Dana & Shirley Mason were stage names, & with Edna were Virginia & Leonnie Flugrath, Made loads of films in silent days, & all were quite tiny, under 5 feet tall. Shirley Mason 'Queen of the Fairies' was the youngest aged around 12 here, even though Edna was the eldest at 20, all look a similar age.
And yet Hollywood didn’t want sound until 1927?
There were actually several reason why hollywood didn't adapt to sound until the Last 1920s,these include:
-the sound was to quiet for an average 250-1000 person theater
-studios had to rebuild their studios to have electricity
-they had to get New actors that could perform in sound pictures
Too much of a cost to make it worth it.
They were opposed to it from the very beginning.
The main problem was synchronization
There just weren't any devices that could reliably sync video and audio until the late 20's
There were many reasons for this. The principle one of course being cost. This 5 minute experimental picture probably cost a bomb compared to other pictures of the day, and it was designed with sound synchronisation in mind. So no expense or detail would have been soared on it.
Studios would not have wanted to spend that much on each and every picture they released and in most cases would have gone bust if they tried.
Even by 1927 the advent of mainstream talking pictures still came with a myriad of yet to be solved problems.
Have you ever watched an early talkie from the late 20’s? Back then the sound was so sensitive that it would pick up the sound of a mouse farting and amplify it making it sound as though 50 Harley Davidsons had all starting up simultaneously.
Also in the late 20’s they found that working with sound stock compared to the nitrate stock of silent films tended to distort colours and lighting. Which came with other problems to solve.
Literally from 1927 onwards, it was like everybody who worked on the technical side of things, had to tear up the established rule book and solve these new problems as they went along. It was like a brand new industry where even movie veterans became newbies again.
Lastly, and I think this is the most important reason why the possibilities of sound pictures was ignored and shunned for so long was that it was audience limiting and thereby sales limiting.
The audience for any given picture would suddenly become limited to those who understood the language it was shot in.
In the silent days, alternate language title cards were cheap to make and to edit into a film to make the product relative to any audience anywhere in the world.
Anyone anywhere could watch Chaplin and Keaton and laugh at their funny antics. Anyone anywhere could watch Douglas Fairbanks, swashbuckle alone through a deck of pirates and feel the excitement.
If you suddenly add 90 minutes of dialogue in language less than half of your worldwide audience understands, then you lose that audience, and by extension, ticket sales.
Too bad they couldn't make Caruso sound films.
The fairy queen is Viola Dana’s sister, Shirley Mason.
Well, they had to start somewhere. This was interesting at least.
I like it. Talented people
Why didn't we make amplifiers so movies can be shown like this?
What they did was pre-recorded the music and the dialog, then as the actor was being shot they mouthed the sound.Played back in sync looked like they had actually recorded their voices in front of the camera.The problem besides the dis was that the sound could not be amplified loud enough for everyone in the audience to hear.
Edison had bought the rights to Daniel Higham's "friction reproducer" (previously used by Columbia in two of their cylinder machines: the BC and BM Graphophones) in order to amplify playback on the Kinetophone records.
no, that's not generally true of these 1912-1913 kinetophone films. this specific film i cannot say for a fact, but the kinetophone system is not simply a synchronous sound system of exhibition, but also one of recording; sound and image were recorded simultaneously. you can see this manifest itself in the form of the film. these were one shot films, restricted to a single, quite cramped, tableau. in 1912 this isn't necessarily the predominate style, and if these were mostly pre-recorded, one would imagine some variation in the films. some quick research could tell you this, check out the recent restorations the Library of Congress did, and if you're curious, this article could give you a (unfortunately very brief) rundown: www.jstor.org/stable/1224919
Michael Mcgee Yet they did infact have a “sound on film” process available at the time. Eugene Lauste helped with that. The reason no one backed him is because Edison had a second crack at sound films with the “sound on disc” process, of which this is an example.
Details on this film are scant, but it is unlikely that the sound was pre-recorded. It's hard to lip sync a dog barking.
In addition to being an early experimental sound film, all of the audio was recorded acoustically through big horns onto a cylinder. No microphones, mixers, or vacuum tubes yet. We're likely seeing a hurried version of a touring stage musical, and the actors all were trained to really belt out their songs and lines. It was all lung power before amplification. Maybe someday we will learn who these actors were.
This was definitely not pre-recorded. They used a very large recording horn and a very sensitive recording diaphragm.
That was weird - an amalgamation of fairy tale characters intermingling, and a trick dog at the very end. A kind of Gilbert & Sullivan-inspired mishmash with some jokes tossed in. I expect this is the kind of thing that American audiences saw in large and small theaters as live performances on the vaudeville circuit at that time.
Probably.
Do you get that this is a talking film 7 years prior to Jazz Singer? If you don't like the content, think of the historical aspect of this. The content is irrelevant.
@@johncarpenter624 Not 7 years, but 14 years. This was made in 1913. The Jazz Singer came out in 1927.
Well that was odd