This is an interesting excerpt from days of old. Robert Paul employed cinematographer Paul Robello (from Scotland) to record a wedding, horses stampeding and cars en route to Aberdeen University.
The movie starts off from where we can see multitudinous crowds all gathering. It's a simple square at first, but then as the camera panels, it starts to augment with people, who we don't really know. It seems to be one of the first events or gatherings ever filmed; it's not like "The ? Motorist" or "The Spiritualist Fraud"; it's more akin to Robert Paul's earlier film "Dehli Durbar" where the camera is, what would seem very perfunctory today, put on a tripod and traversing through the scene in a documentary fashion, which has now been adopted today. This movie was made just subsequent from the Edison Kinetoscope, and while it's not very entertaining, it's really fascinating to see some of the architecture, and some of the primitive shots of people in a discreet way.
Yet I am saddened to say, nobody knows Robert W Paul today. He seems to be old news. Well the great thing is that this movie came in a compilation with Paul's other movies such as "The Magic Sword" (a take on the prince story, with an actual human domineering over people like dwarfed miniatures) and so much more on the BFI's "RW Paul collection from 1895-1908"; it encompassed the bulk of his older features, including an allusion to the motion picture in "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901), which is very fascinating, and many of his magician works. This one is a black sheep to his other movies, and shows the genuine passionate output that Robert W Paul had for the moving picture, just like Mathew Brady's passion with using photography to get deeper to the bone of the civil war.
The movie starts off from where we can see multitudinous crowds all gathering. It's a simple square at first, but then as the camera panels, it starts to augment with people, who we don't really know. It seems to be one of the first events or gatherings ever filmed; it's not like "The ? Motorist" or "The Spiritualist Fraud"; it's more akin to Robert Paul's earlier film "Dehli Durbar" where the camera is, what would seem very perfunctory today, put on a tripod and traversing through the scene in a documentary fashion, which has now been adopted today. This movie was made just subsequent from the Edison Kinetoscope, and while it's not very entertaining, it's really fascinating to see some of the architecture, and some of the primitive shots of people in a discreet way.
Yet I am saddened to say, nobody knows Robert W Paul today. He seems to be old news. Well the great thing is that this movie came in a compilation with Paul's other movies such as "The Magic Sword" (a take on the prince story, with an actual human domineering over people like dwarfed miniatures) and so much more on the BFI's "RW Paul collection from 1895-1908"; it encompassed the bulk of his older features, including an allusion to the motion picture in "The Countryman and the Cinematograph" (1901), which is very fascinating, and many of his magician works. This one is a black sheep to his other movies, and shows the genuine passionate output that Robert W Paul had for the moving picture, just like Mathew Brady's passion with using photography to get deeper to the bone of the civil war.
