IBC
Grainy, black and white footage of World War One has been
given the ultimate restoration treatment to startling effect.
Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson has turned all the
firepower of his Lord of the Rings post production house and the
Hollywood facility behind Black Panther, Ready, Player One and Star Wars:
A Solo Story’s 3D finishes to turn black and white film from the First World
War into colour, and in such a startling way that it brings soldiers’ “faces to
life”.
The monumental project, using archive from the Imperial War
Museum (IWM) in the UK, is one of the largest and longest restorations ever
undertaken due mainly to the amount of scanned footage and the post production
processes employed to deliver the final look and sound for the film.
The King Kong and Lord of the Rings trilogy
director has also sharpened some of the footage and slowed down the jitters
that accompanied early, hand-cranked cameras.
A WW1 buff whose British grandfather fought at Gallipoli and
whose hobby is the modelling of highly detailed large-scale World War One
aircraft, was approached by the IWM four years ago to see if he could create
something original about the life of a soldier on the Western front.
Jackson apparently spent several weeks at the museum
watching original WW1 archive and made tests at his Wellington, New Zealand
postproduction facility Park Road Post on four minutes of footage.
“The faces of the men just jump out at you. It’s the faces,
it’s the people, that come to life in this film.”
Jackson said he was helped by the fact that dozens of
feature films were shot during the 1914 to 18 conflict. “It was like a World
War One franchise.”
“I wanted to have as much [film footage] as I could,”
Jackson told Yahoo. “I didn’t want it to be limited, by saying ‘give me some of
your best film’. So, I just asked the IWM to give me everything they had,
within reason.”
Jackson ended up with over a hundred hours of film and about
500 hours of audio interviews from 120 veterans recorded by the BBC for 1960s
TV series The Great War. Clips from this would provide the audio for the
90-minute documentary They Shall Not Grow Old.
Jackson was intrigued if computing power could erase the
technical limitations of 100 year cinema “to see and hear the Great War as they
experienced it.”
The restoration of the film fell into three key phases –
transformation, colour creation, and stereoscopic 3D conversion.
Transformation
The IWM sent all the material to Jackson’s New Zealand-based Park Road Post where artists completed an initial black and white levelling pass on the original negative to bring overexposed and underexposed footage up to a similar consistent level.
The IWM sent all the material to Jackson’s New Zealand-based Park Road Post where artists completed an initial black and white levelling pass on the original negative to bring overexposed and underexposed footage up to a similar consistent level.
The 100-year old footage, much of which had been shot on the
front line, had tears, defects, chemical marks, dust, shrinkage, duplication
and starches, scratches and other issues of deterioration.
The footage was cleaned up then digitised and digital
repairs made. All 100 hours had its level of grain evened out for
consistency. Some footage was very grainy, other clips actually needed addition
of more texture to make it appear sharper.
The footage was then re-timed so that the older footage,
shot at 13 frames a second, was scaled to the more familiar look and speed of
conventional cinema frame rate of 24fps. Our traditional view of WW1 and
pre-WW1 footage is of judder (or ‘over-cranked’) because it has been sped up to
24fps without consideration for the difference in frame rate. The team were
able to smooth the film out to play back at 24fps for more lifelike movement.
“You didn’t really notice them when the troops were all sped
up and jerky, but suddenly they just come into a focus,” says Jackson.
Colour
Perhaps the most controversial decision was to colourise the material, although as Jackson points out, colour was the way those soldiers saw the world.
Perhaps the most controversial decision was to colourise the material, although as Jackson points out, colour was the way those soldiers saw the world.
“I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these
men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more - rather
than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film,”
he explains.
For its part, the Imperial War Museum hoped that colour
would draw in audiences, younger audiences in particular, that would otherwise
find a flickering black and white film hard to relate to.
Jackson leant on historians to provide detailed notes for
each shot identifying each soldier’s rank, uniform colours, what each item
should look like. The team also studied pictures of crowds from the internet
and drew on Jackson’s extensive private collection of First World War uniforms
as reference.
Jackson himself travelled alone through Flanders and France
taking thousands photos of the former battlefields to accurately match the
colour palettes of the landscape.
The bulk of the colourisation process itself was a manual
job. Each frame was rotoscoped, the time-consuming process of painting every
part of every frame.
Milton Adamou, Head of Post and colourist for the project at
Stereo D described the process to Yahoo “as mostly forensic but also
creative”.
“On one hand we’re recreating a photo-real world, striving
to provide an accurate interpretation of the environment and the people within
it. Everything in the frame is dissected and analysed, then cross-referenced
against records from multiple sources. From the unusually elusive colour of the
British uniforms, to more obscure items such as a goatskin jerkin we see once
in the movie, we painstakingly laboured over every detail.
“Then we had some creative freedom to hone in on details
that will be visually interesting to the audience. For instance, many of the
soldiers wore private purchase shirts or other clothing, which we subsequently
varied in colour to break up large areas of uniformity.”
Lip readers were hired to interpret what the soldiers are
saying to each other to provide context for editing the audio narration.
Supervising Foley editor was Craig Tomlinson, whose credits
include all Hobbit and LOTR films, The Adventures of Tintin, District
9 and King Kong.
3D
If it’s content worth telling, it’s content worth pushing the boundaries for. That’s been Jackson’s maxim on feature films.
If it’s content worth telling, it’s content worth pushing the boundaries for. That’s been Jackson’s maxim on feature films.
Not content with shooting epic amounts of visual effects
for The Lord of the Rings he pioneered a new form of motion capture
with actor Andy Serkis, turning the character of Gollum into a believable
performance-captured animation.
Deciding to shoot The Hobbit: An Unexpected
Journey in 4K, an exotic resolution back in 2012, he also made the film in
stereo 3D and accentuated the realism with an extreme frame rate of 48 frames a
second.
No surprise then that he decided to make the WW1 project
more complicated by rendering it in 3D. You could probably count the number of
critically acclaimed stereoscopy film and TV shows on one hand but three of
them have been documentaries: Wim Wenders’ Pina, Werner Herzog’s Cave
of Forgotten Dreams and the Sir David Attenborough-fronted Flying
Monsters. All these were shot using stereo cameras rather than digitally
converted but prove that 3D can work for documentary storytelling by immersing
the viewer in the material.
Jackson had no choice but to stereo convert for They
Shall Not Grow Old, but he couldn’t have picked a more world class place
to do it.
Burbank-based Stereo D, part of the Deluxe group since 2011,
is behind the 2D to 3D conversion of nearly every blockbuster you can name
from Ant Man and the Wasp toAvengers: Infinity War and Jurassic
World: Fallen Kingdom.
The most difficult part of any 2D-3D process is always the
creation of footage that doesn’t exist. Stereo D explained that foreground
elements are extracted from background elements to create the depth needed, but
this means VFX artists have to guess what appears behind the foreground
elements, and create it from scratch.
There are algorithmic workarounds for this and Stereo D used
its own proprietary software to extrapolate information from adjacent frames to
composite new elements.
Stereo D’s 400 strong team of artists performed the bulk of
work on the project including colourisation and restoration.
The finished feature length doc demonstrates that old
footage can not only be restored, it can be enhanced and used in new ways to
tell new stories about our history.
They Shall Not Grow Old was commissioned by the
Imperial War Museum and the 14-18 NOW project (the UK’s official arts
programme for the World War One centenary) to commemorate the centenary of
Armistice Day.
It is produced by Jackson’s WingNut Films, executive
produced by Tessa Ross at House Productions with Trafalgar Releasing
coordinating a simultaneous screening of the film in cinemas on October 16. It
will also be distributed to secondary schools in the country before being
broadcast in the UK on BBC1 on 11 November, Armistice Day.
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