![]() “Lots of people over the years have asked me about making a First World War film,” he said, “but I’ve never really had a desire to make a Hollywood movie about the war.” The Museum holds one of the greatest archives of original footage that was shot at the time for the First World War - at least 2,200 hours’ worth, Jackson noted. Not long after, the organization contacted him and asked if he might be interested in making a documentary marking the centenary of the WWI Armistice using film footage from their archive. That process initiated a relationship between the director and the IWM. “They look old, and you’ve got that detachment, whereas when we colored some stills for this, all of a sudden it evoked a whole other level of emotion.” “Peter is very much of the view that it’s very easy to stay detached when things are black-and-white,” explains They Shall Not Grow Old producer Clare Olssen. For that exhibit, Jackson drew on still photographic images from Britain’s Imperial War Museum (IWM), which he then colorized, overseen by Weta Digital Visual Effects Supervisor Wayne Stables, who also had family members who served in the war. In 2015, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Gallipoli, Jackson created a photo exhibit, The Great War Exhibition, which ran from April 2015 to December 2018 at the Dominion Museum Building at the Pukeahu National War Memorial in Wellington, New Zealand. “In a way, while I was making this film, I felt that this was my chance to learn what he would have experienced,” the director said. ![]() ![]() The family bookcases were filled with World War I books. ![]() His grandfather, a professional British soldier since even before the war began, fought throughout its entirety. The Great War, as it was known, was in Jackson’s universe from childhood. This became the First World War film I was waiting all these years to make.” “They’re no longer buried in a fog of film grain and scratches and stuttering and sped-up footage. “The humanity of the people on the film jumps out at you, especially the faces,” Jackson said in the film’s production notes. It’s described, via archival interviews in voiceover, by those who fought it. The artists turned age-ravaged silent footage into colorized, dimensionalized and speed-corrected imagery with natural movement and appearance that finally places viewers into the shoes of those who fought the war. Jackson’s remarkable documentary, produced by his Wingnut Films Productions and released by Warner Bros., draws on 100 hours of archival footage, transformed both by Burbank-based Stereo D and his own team at Park Road Post in New Zealand. Then it’s as if Dorothy has opened the door to Oz - suddenly, those flat characters become human beings, looking like we do, moving as we do, feeling what we would feel in their shoes. That’s how most of us see what soldiers experienced in the First World War when viewing historic wartime footage - a flat, gray, silent war, as seen in the first portion of Peter Jackson’s recent documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. Scratchy, sped-up, black and white footage of soldiers in varying degrees of gray uniforms, zipping around the screen like dull, Chaplinesque warriors, blithely posing for a fixed camera. Subject matter includes Imperial Japanese troops in 1931 Manchuria, remarkable domestic scenes of 1930s Japan, preparation for war in 1939, and images of occupation in 1940s Shanghai.Here's the Definitive Story of the Mammoth Restoration Project, Which Encompassed Frame-Rate Retiming, Digital Image Restoration, Colorization, and Stereo Conversion to Startling Effect Almost all the material in this color documentary has been recently discovered and allows the viewer to experience Japanese culture and events from an entirely new perspective. Now you can discover the story of a nation at war from its rare color films, plus letters and diaries from those who lived through it. This documentary is remarkable proof that those assumptions were verifiably false. It was assumed no color films existed in Japan until the victorious U.S. Japan’s War in Color looks to present both the innocent and the guilty parties involved in what was culturally touted as a Holy War, and examine the effect it had on all of their lives. The film also utilizes original letters and diary entries written by Japanese soldiers and civilians during the war. Using rare and, in some cases, never before seen color footage, this documentary examines World War II from the perspective of the Japanese.
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