Many of Smith's films were acquired for distribution by Charles Urban for the Warwick Trading Company and the two began a long business relationship with a joint show of Smith and Méliès' films at the Alhambra Theatre, Brighton in late 1898 and early 1899. In 1899 Smith, with the financial assistance of Urban, constructed a glass house film studio at St. Ann's Well Gardens, ushering in a highly creative period for him as a film maker. That year he shot the single scene The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) which was then seamlessly edited into Cecil Hepworth's View From an Engine Front - Train Leaving Tunnel (1899) to enliven the staid phantom ride genre and demonstrate the possibilities of creative editing. The following year he experimented with reversing in The House That Jack Built (1900), developed dream-time and the dissolve effect in Let Me Dream Again (1900) and pioneered the use of the close-up with Grandma's Reading Glass, As Seen Through a Telescope and Spiders on a Web (all 1900). Film historian Frank Gray describes this experimental period, from 1897 to 1900, as Smith's laboratory years. In 1902 Smith collaborated with old friend Georges Méliès at the Star Films studio in Montreil, Paris, on a pre-enactment of the Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra commissioned by Charles Urban of the Warwick Trading Company after rival company Mutoscope and Biograph acquired the rights to film the actual event. In 1903 Charles Urban left the Warwick Trading Company to form the Charles Urban Trading Company taking the rights to Smith's films with him, at what marked the end of his most active period as a film-maker. At Laboratory Lodge In 1904, A. H. Tee took over the lease on St Ann's Well Gardens, and Smith moved to a new home in Southwick, Sussex, dubbed Laboratory Lodge, where with finance from Charles Urban, he went on to develop the Lee-Turner Process, which had been acquired by Urban following the death of Edward Raymond Turner in 1903, into the first successful colour film process, Kinemacolor. Smith proved the new process, which abandoned the three-colour approach of Edward Turner in favour of a two-colour (red-green) process, with early test films such as Tartans of Scottish Clans (1906) and Woman Draped in Patterned Handkerchiefs (1908) before giving a trade demonstration of A Visit to the Seaside (1908) on 1 May 1908, followed by public