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While we're longing for the dizzying thrill of being on a Coney Island ride, a new refurbished and colorized video of Luna Park in 1910 has surfaced, and it's a sight to behold.
In the video, thousands of people swarm the amusement park in their straw hats and frocks, kids gobble down ice cream cones and gawk at a roller coaster set on a giant rocking track and an elephant passes by. The scene it depicts was Luna Park at its peak, according to HeartofConeyIsland.com.
Ukrainian digital artist Alex Holov on Monday uploaded the video, which he downloaded from the Silent Movie Cinema archive (you can see the original here), colorized it and increased the quality using AI algorithms, he tells us.
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"This whole process takes a while, depends on your computer equipment possibilities, but in the end, you get really magical time-traveling effect when you see the result," he says. "It’s really breathtakingly to watch a video that shot 110 years ago in this quality, where you can feel more this old epoch and see how people behaved, what they were wearing, which cars they drove."
He and his daughter had been wondering how theme parks looked in the past, so they began their search and found the Luna Park video on archive.org. Holov had been experimenting with AI algorithms, so he decided to enhance it.
"Everyone could take away something specific from the colorized video," he says. "For me, personally, it helps to understand the past better. It's like a time-traveling machine for me."
For us it is, too–the video puts you right in the middle of the bustling amusement park and brings back the feelings of lighthearted fun we get from a visit to Coney Island.
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