Multimedia

There were color movies from the earliest days of cinema, including Edison’s 1895 short Annabelle’s Dance and George Méliès famous 1902 A Trip to the Moon which he sold in black and white and in color (for an additional fee, of course). They were hand-colored, however, not shot in color. The French film studio Pathé … Read the full post →“Early Kodachrome color motion pictures”

Rare color footage of the London Blitz shot by air warden Alfred Coucher between September 7th, 1940 and May 10th, 1941 was recently found by his family in the attic where he had stored it after the war. Coucher’s granddaughter, Carolyn Keen (not the author of Nancy Drew Mystery Stories, but she gets points for the … Read the full post →“Rare color footage of London Blitz revealed on 70th anniversary”

The new expedition to fully map and record the wreck of the Titanic has had to repair to St. John’s, Newfoundland temporarily to avoid getting whupped by Hurricane Danielle. Inclement weather notwithstanding, the team has already captured impressive new 3DHD footage of various parts of the wreck. Here’s the famous bow so goofily captured by … Read the full post →“First pics and film from new Titanic survey”

Filmmakers from the Platige Image studio in collaboration with historians from the Warsaw Uprising Museum have created a unique 3D documentary depicting the devastation of Warsaw in spring 1945, right after the end of the war in Europe. Poland had been invaded by Nazi forces in 1939 and was occupied for 6 years. It was … Read the full post →“3D film shows devastated 1945 Warsaw”

Another slow news Sunday here, but I did find an addictive little YouTube channel run by Historic Royal Palaces, the British independent charity which cares for the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House, Kensington Palace and Kew Palace. The videos in the channel cover the history of those sites and their royal … Read the full post →“Henry VIII’s kitchens at Hampton Court Palace”

A team of biologists decoding the Neanderthal genome have discovered that much to most everyone’s surprise that many people alive today have Neanderthals in their family tree. From one to four percent of Eurasian human genome seems to have come from Neanderthals. Scientists, led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology … Read the full post →“The Neanderthal in you”

This Sunday at 9 PM EST, the National Geographic Channel will broadcast an hour-long documentary about the Staffordshire Hoard called Lost Gold of the Dark Ages. It’s going to have the usual unhealthy complement of goofy medieval battle recreations, but hopefully there will be plenty of hard facts and, most importantly, some great photography of … Read the full post →“Staffordshire Hoard on National Geographic Channel”