Local films for local people |
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inhabitants of Royston Vasey might have just a few difficulties
reaching their local shop |
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They
were making films in Holmfirth long before there was a Hollywood,
movies were being shown in Bradford from the very beginning and the
film and television crews are still coming. We go in search of locations,
past and present, in West Yorkshire. |
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In
the beginning...
It
could
all be said to have started in West Yorkshire. In 1897 Louis Le
Prince, a French photographer working in Leeds, managed to create
a few moving images of his back garden and, a few months later,
did the same on Leeds Bridge. The moving picture was born but
Le Prince mysteriously disappeared in 1890 and it was the Lumiere
brothers who came to be hailed as the fathers of cinematography.
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| The
national museum for film stands on the site of the Peoples'
Palace |
The
first commercial showing of moving pictures in Great Britian took
place in London in February 1896 but it is probable that the first
film show out "in the sticks," (using the Lumiere brothers'
'Machine') occured at the Peoples' Palace music hall in Bradford
just a couple of months later. The National Museum of Photography,
Film and Television now stands on this site.
Making
moving pictures soon became all the rage and film companies sprang
up across West Yorkshire. They made pictures in Holmfirth long before
they made them in Hollywood. As time went on the cameras moved out
of the studios and film-makers from further afield made their way
'up north,' looking for new locations.
Today
West Yorkshire's villages and towns, situated as they are between
the Yorkshire Television in Leeds and the Granada studios in Manchester,
continue to play a starring role in TV productions and film crews
regularly descend on the area. Long-running series like A Touch
of Frost and Emmerdale make it impossible to name every location
used in the area and there's many a celebrated film or television
series that is now long forgotten.
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