HOME
The making of
Real objects, real photographs, and the truth in between.
To build this, we went back through more than 1,500 archival images of Seattle. We brought the best of them back to color and matched each antique to a real place and a real moment, so the objects sit inside the city they actually came from, not a stage set.
Coming this June
Filmed this summer and arriving late June, the feature reaches past these photographs and objects into the historical record itself. You will see Seattle from the life before the settlers, through the city’s transformation, the great fire, the rebirth, and what it actually takes to become a world-class city.
Not a costume drama and not nostalgia. We go to the real archives, including the stuffy, unglamorous parts, because that is where the documented truth lives. If we can document what is true, that is the whole basis of it.
On the technology
I have been building with AI for over forty years. I am not new to it, and I am not afraid of it. What interests me is what it is actually good for.
The key value of this technology, the thing that matters, is truth. Used well, it lets us recover what was real: bring a faded photograph back to the color it once had, place a real object back in the room it lived in, and let a moment from a hundred years ago be seen again as it was. The goal was never to fake the past, but rather to get closer to it.
That is the standard we hold this work to. Where something is an AI reconstruction, we say so. Where something is a real archival photograph, we say that too. The technology earns its place only when it serves the truth of how people actually lived.
In today’s life, and even more in the future, it is going to matter to know where content comes from. That is the value at the center of this work: Beauty, Truth, and Love, the core values of the Conru Art Foundation, and something we encourage everyone to share.