Rare footage of Incheon from early 1900s will be recreated three-dimensionally via AI

Rare footage of Incheon shot more than a century ago will be brought back to life using AI, allowing viewers to see the city’s past and present scenery overlapped in 3-D.

The open port area of Incheon is seen in this footage still from 1909. [KOREAN FILM ARCHIVE]

Rare footage of Incheon shot more than a century ago will be brought back to life using AI, allowing viewers to see the city’s past and present scenery overlapped in 3-D.

The Incheon Metropolitan Government on Monday released rare video footage of Incheon’s port and urban areas in the early 1900s. The footage, running for a total of 6 minutes and 31 seconds, is believed to have been filmed by a French national between February and April 1908. Last year, the Korean Film Archive discovered that the Cinémathèque française, a private film archive in Paris, held the footage.

The video is titled “The Corean Ports.” Its opening scenes were filmed near Donuimun, also known as Seodaemun, in Seoul. The remaining roughly three and a half minutes capture Incheon’s open port and old downtown areas.

In the early 1900s, the waters off Incheon were home to countless ferry boats. Carts loaded with construction materials for nearby land reclamation projects moved busily along dirt streets, and merchants laid out their goods on makeshift stalls in front of the pier.

Wolmi Island was once connected to the mainland by a military railroad bridge. The wooden bridge was built by the Japanese military in July 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War to transport military supplies and coal stored on Wolmi. The bridge was completed in February 1905 but was dismantled in 1911 after authorities determined that wooden debris from the bridge was interfering with tidal currents.

Vessels from the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) are docked at a rice pier used exclusively for domestic trade in this footage still from 1908. [KOREAN FILM ARCHIVE]

“The main filming locations are believed to have been around what is now the site of the Centennial Memorial Tower of Protestantism in Hang-dong 1-ga, Jung District, and near the Incheon chapter of the Korea Institute of Registered Architects in Hang-dong 4-ga,” said an Incheon city official.

The Korean Film Archive plans to grant Incheon the rights to use the footage. The city said it will combine the video with AI technology to produce content that three-dimensionally compares and recreates past areas of Incheon to the city’s current landscape.

“This footage was filmed more than a decade earlier than materials from the 1920s, held by the Incheon Metropolitan City Museum, making it the oldest known moving images of Incheon,” an Incheon city official said. “It vividly captures the city’s early scenery as it grew into a modern international port city [...] as well as the diverse cultural and economic vitality taking shape at the time, giving [the footage] immense historical and archival value.”

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom. BY CHOI MO-RAN [kim.minyoung5@joongang.co.kr]