the St. Ann's Well Gardens in Hove from the estate of financier and philanthropist Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, which he cultivated into a popular pleasure garden, where from 1894 he started staging public exhibitions of hot air ballooning, parachute jumps, a monkey house, a fortune teller, a hermit living in a cave and magic lantern shows of a series of dissolving views. Smith also began to present these dioramic lectures at the Brighton Aquarium, where he had first performed with Douglas Blackburn in 1882. Smith's skilful manipulation of the lantern, cutting between lenses (from slide to slide) to show changes in time, perspective and location necessary for story telling, would allow him to develop many of the skills he would later put to use as a pioneering film maker developing the grammar of film editing. Smith had attended the Lumière programme in Leicester Square in March 1896 and spurred on by the films of Robert Paul, which played in Brighton for that summer season, he and local chemist James Williamson acquired a prototype cine cameras from local engineer Alfred Darling, who had begun to manufacture film equipment after carrying out repairs for Brighton-based film pioneer Esmé Collings. In 1897, with the technical assistance of Darling and chemicals purchased from Williamson, Smith turned the pump house into a film factory for developing and printing and developed into a successful commercial film processor as well as patenting a camera and projector system of his own. Both he and his neighbour Williamson would go on to become pioneering film makers in their own right creating numerous historic minute-long films. On 29 March 1897, Smith added animated photographs to the end of his twice-daily programme of projected entertainment at the Brighton Aquarium, as an outlet for his burgeoning film production. Many of Smith's early films, including The Miller and the Sweep and Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer (both filmed in 1897) were comedies thanks to the influence of his wife, Laura Bayley, who had previously acted in pantomime and comic revue. However Smith also corresponded with special effects pioneer Georges Méliès whose influence can be seen in The X-Rays and The Haunted Castle (both 1897) the later of which, along with The Corsican Brothers, Photographing a Ghost and, perhaps his most accomplished work from this time, Santa Claus (all 1898), include special effects created using a process of double-exposure patented by Smith.