not a bad bit of work
Jan. 21st, 2019 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleveni dragged dïe überblønde off to see they shall not grow old, peter jackson and company's rather impressive WW1 documentary. they took ~100 hours of century-old damaged black-and-white silent film and ~600 hours of recorded individual oral histories, and turned them into 90 minutes of coherent story about what it was like to be a british infantryman during the war, a sort of a consensus everyman version of WW1.¹
along the way, they did some amazing technical work cleaning up the original footage, which was variously nth-generation copies, badly scratched, under-exposed, over-exposed, and/or shot at odd frame rates. to which they got lip-readers and voice actors to provide semblances of the words spoken in the original. and then added sound effects to match the action.
they also colorized the movie, which i think achieved their goal of humanizing the black-and-white originals, but i'm not sure how much more humanity that adds after everything else.
the movie returned to theaters only for the day, so you'll have to watch it on your favorite streaming service. i really think you should; it's a tour de force, not only technically, but also narratively.
1: as mr. jackson pointed out in the making-of short that followed the credits, there was so much old footage that one of their real challenges was just figuring out what sort of story to tell. there's apparently so much more material left, one just as easily make a movie about british airmen or sailors during the war, or any of the individual nationalities of troops from the british empire, or the US forces.
but since his grandpa was an infantryman, and that's what most british soldiers were, that's what he wanted to make.
along the way, they did some amazing technical work cleaning up the original footage, which was variously nth-generation copies, badly scratched, under-exposed, over-exposed, and/or shot at odd frame rates. to which they got lip-readers and voice actors to provide semblances of the words spoken in the original. and then added sound effects to match the action.
they also colorized the movie, which i think achieved their goal of humanizing the black-and-white originals, but i'm not sure how much more humanity that adds after everything else.
the movie returned to theaters only for the day, so you'll have to watch it on your favorite streaming service. i really think you should; it's a tour de force, not only technically, but also narratively.
1: as mr. jackson pointed out in the making-of short that followed the credits, there was so much old footage that one of their real challenges was just figuring out what sort of story to tell. there's apparently so much more material left, one just as easily make a movie about british airmen or sailors during the war, or any of the individual nationalities of troops from the british empire, or the US forces.
but since his grandpa was an infantryman, and that's what most british soldiers were, that's what he wanted to make.