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City of Gold (1957 film)

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City of Gold
Directed by
Written byRoman Kroitor
Produced byTom Daly
Narrated byPierre Berton
Cinematography
  • Colin Low
  • Wolf Koenig
Edited byTom Daly
Music byEldon Rathburn
Distributed byNational Film Board of Canada
Release date
  • 1957 (1957)
Running time
21 min 40 sec
CountryCanada
LanguageEnglish
Budget$20,771[1]

City of Gold is a 1957 Canadian documentary film by Colin Low and Wolf Koenig, chronicling Dawson City during the Klondike Gold Rush. It made innovative use of archival photos and camera movements to animate still images, while also combining narration and music to bring drama to the whole. Its innovative use of still photography in this manner has been cited by Ken Burns as the source of inspiration for his so-called Ken Burns effect, a type of panning and zooming effect used in video production to animate still images.[2][3][4]

The film is narrated by Pierre Berton and produced by the National Film Board of Canada.[5]

Production

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The film grew out of an earlier 1952 idea to promote tourism and sport in Yukon. In researching for the film, Low and Koenig found some still photos in an Ottawa archive and tried to improve the panning method Low had employed on his 1955 visual arts documentary, Jolifou Inn. Low then discovered a much larger set of archival images of the Yukon Gold Rush, from photographer Eric A. Hegg's collection at the University of Washington in Seattle. The problem of how to animate the images via camera movement prior to the invention of computer-assisted animation cameras was resolved by Kroitor, who enlisted British mathematician Brian Salt to devise mathematical tables, and developed a device dubbed the 'Kroitorer' that allowed one to take single photos of the archival images as if photographing real-life scenes with a hand-held camera.[1]

Awards

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ a b Evans, Gary (1991). In the national interest : a chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Repr. ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. p. 75. ISBN 0802068332. Retrieved 16 August 2016. In the National Interest City of Gold.
  2. ^ ""Capturing the American Experience: A Conversation with Ken Burns" by Mikel Vause". Archived from the original on 2019-08-06. Retrieved 2010-12-12.
  3. ^ ""Historical Photographs and Multimedia Storytelling" by Charles Williams". Archived from the original on 2007-10-13. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  4. ^ ""All That Glitters: City of Gold Revisited" by John C. Tibbetts" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-26. Retrieved 2007-08-08.
  5. ^ a b "City of Gold". onf-nfb.gc.ca. National Film Board of Canada. 11 October 2012. Retrieved 11 January 2023.
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