Colour: Alfreton Oct 3rd 1931 - The Derbyshire Royal Infirmary Carnival

Saturday Oct 3rd 1931 The carnival parade captured in this wonderfully well-preserved vintage film is brimful of colourful characters, with magnificently decked-out locals taking to the streets in all manner of fancy dress, from clowns to nurses and even a small child dressed as a snowball. The town's "big effort" for the Derbyshire Royal Infirmary raised at least £274 and was reported in the Derby Daily Telegraph as a "huge success". A great deal of care has clearly gone into the elaborate floats and costumes, with the marchers including several clowns, an animated scarecrow and a young snowball (walking hand-in-hand with Britannia). For modern viewers the procession's charm is tempered, though, by one participant in 'minstrel' blackface. The film was produced for the Empire Cinema, which was open on the high street until 1975. It's not known who the filmmakers were, but they're no amateurs: the photography is crisp and clear, and camera positions are well-chosen to capture the flavour of the parade. At one point, a camera is mounted on a moving float, and we briefly see another cameraman shooting from the top of a parked car as the parade passes him by. 16mm Film © The Media Archive for Central England This colour version was made using FFMPEG to cut the original black and white video into 3903 frames then colouring the individual frames using DeepAI (artificial intelligence) then again with FFMPEG to stitch the frames back to a colour video then add a vintage audio track. Thanks to endim8 at github using his python batch-colorize script we were able to batch process the Deep AI colorization.