[1] The film is a short reconstruction, using miniature models, of a recent historical event: the eruption on 8 May 1902 of Mount Pelée, which destroyed the town of Saint-Pierre, Martinique.

The Méliès descendant and film scholar Jacques Malthête hypothesized that a type of flare known as the Feu de Bengale was used (as Méliès did four years later to create an eruption of Mount Vesuvius in The Merry Frolics of Satan); film historians René Jeanne and Charles Ford nominated a flammable combination of cloth, colored water, cinders, and a kind of powdered chalk called Blanc d'Espagne; Méliès's granddaughter, Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, indicated that starch was poured down the model to simulate lava, and that pieces of paper and unseasoned wood were burned to create smoke; and the Méliès expert John Frazer suggested that the model was made of cardboard and paper and that "the eruption [was] created by a combination of flashing lights, powdered chalk, and cinders.

[2] Zecca's version, produced in May 1902 as Catastrophe de la Martinique (number 544 in the Pathé Frères catalogue), used four stagehands to create the eruption effect: one burning sulfur behind the model mountain, another pouring down smoke from a ladder off screen, a third on another ladder throwing down handfuls of sawdust to represent cinders, and a fourth agitating the miniature sea and raising the water level to suggest a tidal wave.

[3] The film historian Georges Sadoul notes that Zecca's version aims for academic realism in its style, creating an effect markedly different from Méliès's deliberately Romanticized portrayal.

"[8] According to the film historian Lewis Jacobs, the crew that created the Edison version found their own unique way to simulate the eruption: they exposed a barrel of beer to direct sunlight and waited for it to explode.