Filmmaker Creates Stunning Video of 1900s America Using Old Photographs

Old black-and-white film photographs are often the best windows we have into history, but they don’t do a very good job at it — grainy and devoid of spatial depth, it’s hard to really imagine yourself in the thick of, say, a rain-swept cobblestone street in Boston, 1893. However, using modern technology, Moscow-based digital artist Alexey Zakharov has recreated the scenes in scanned old photographs of New York, Boston and Washington D.C., as living, breathing 3D environments using the camera projection feature in 3ds Max. The finished animation is titled “The Old New World,” and goes to show how far powerful computer programmes are able to aid our understanding of a different era by placing us right in the middle of it all.