Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

 This is the second comparison, which was 4 seconds from the start. I used the fort to match the frames. So, at the reenacted Zapruder's 4 second mark, as he descends the hill, JFK is emerging from behind the freeway sign already? But, that's impossible. Here is the comparable frame from my shoot.

You can see the sign peaking into the frame on the lower right. 

But, this makes me realize that the phony sign they put in did not subsume the real sign. They just added it. It was one sign and then the other. 

So, the question is: how did they remove the real sign from the film to avoid having two?

First, I'm sure that some of the frames with the real sign were removed. Many researchers have said they removed frames to hide the slowing and near-stopping of the limo. But, they could also have removed frames with the sign. But, they were limited in how much they could do that and get away with it. 

But, there is something else they did to facilitate the process. I think they cropped the bottom of some frames because the real sign was low in the film. So, they could mostly cut it out that way. 

So, it wasn't just removing frames, but cutting frames. 

Look at this view from Zapruder's pedestal.

So, Zapruder was up high, and the sign wasn't that tall. It was at the bottom of his frame. So, what if they made a transverse cut across, from left to right to remove the sign? I believe they did that. JFK was Zapruder's subject, and in filming him, he wanted to keep him centered. He started off doing it, but then, it appears that he raised the camera, shifting JFK down to the bottom of the frame. And then, he recovered and resumed being more centered. 

So, JFK was dead center in 183, then 291 is the nadir of his descent to the bottom, and then there was a gradual recovery. 
Why would Zapruder do that? How hard was it to keep his subject centered all the time? Was Abe just incompetent? 

So, I think we're looking at a partial frame in 291. It was cut. The bottom was removed. It was done to remove the real freeway sign. And once they passed it, they could go back to the normal centering. 

The only alternative to that theory is to say that Zapruder didn't know what he was doing; that he was a lousy filmer. But, I don't buy that because it just wasn't that hard, and his complete focus was in keeping JFK in view. That was his purpose. He had no other objective. He had nothing else to think about. 

So, I think they cut it, and then, they may have had to touch it up some with paint- like a surgeon who removes most of the tumor with surgery and then tries to get rid of the rest with chemotherapy. And some frames, the worst ones, they removed completely. They took advantage of that option as much as they could- whatever the eye would tolerate. And that, I believe, is how they removed the real Stemmons freeway sign from the Zapruder film.