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Considered the world’s first documentary feature, South was a record of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1914 to 1916 Endurance expedition to Antarctica, during which the ship was crushed by ice, stranding the crew. Over a hundred years after the ship was lost beneath the ice and Shackleton had led his crew to safety in an epic feat of survival, sponsored expedition organised by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust attempted to find and film the wreck.
They did so, with historian and presenter Dan Snow on board
the South African icebreaker Agulhas II, to publicise the event.
That 2022 expedition and the original heroic failure are the subject of new
film Endurance which not only colourises the original footage but uses AI to
bring Shackelton’s voice to back to life.
It’s directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin
Oscar-winning filmmakers of Free Solo and Emmy-winning documentary The
Rescue, about the against-all-odds rescue of 12 boys and their coach from
inside a flooded cave in northern Thailand.
Bob Eisenhardt edited both of those docs and is also a
producer on Endurance. The production had access to the 4K restoration
of South from the BFI that was released in 2019.
“We wanted to make sure we could tell the Shackleton story and give it weight
in the film because it's just one of the greatest survival stories there is.”
There was around 40 minutes of remastered footage but in the
process of accessing it from the BFI they discovered another unrestored reel of
10 minutes.
“The Hurley footage
is spectacular. It looks like it was shot yesterday, but unfortunately when
they abandoned the ship, they abandoned the cameras.
“So we had half the story we could tell through Hurley and the other half of
the adventure, the fight for survival, was dramatically reconstructed.”
They filmed original recreations in
California and Iceland, on glaciers and recreated boats in actual ice and
freezing temperatures.
Treating
the archive
“For the longest time I was just looking at the footage as a
1.3:3 image in black and white and it felt like we should keep that as an
artifact. But when compared to the other material it also began to look like
you were looking through a little porthole.
“The first decision was to blow it up a little to 1.6:6 and as soon as we did
that we could see what was happening in the images much better. Then we talked
about how we could the whole story more immediate. The big problem with history
is how you make it resonate for audiences. That’s when the idea of trying
colour came in.”
Hurley had in fact tinted his original film with sequences in blue, green and
amber. It looks somewhat crude today but was cutting edge for its time.
However, their agreement with the BFI explicitly forbade any colourisation. “We
couldn’t touch the footage,” says Eisenhardt. “So we ran an experiment. We had
our partners at BigStar use AI to colour a sample of the image and it looked
amazing.
“I’d been living with the black and white footage for six months and suddenly
the images jumped off the screen. You can see that they’re eating peas for
dinner and there was Shackleton in the middle of the scenes which you never
really noticed before.”
They still had to get permission from the BFI. “They were adamant against
colouring it. The archivists were very afraid of the Peter Jackson effect -
that we would be creating something completely new. We wanted to stay away from
that too, but they also insisted that the colours be accurate. That was very complicated but we solved it by devising a
colour wash. When the BFI saw the colour wash samples they allowed us to do it.
The fact that we were able to use colour gave the story so much more life.”
Like Jackson’s work
on the Imperial War Museum’s archive to make They Shall Not Grow Old
however, they did use AI to interpolate or create new frames to enable the film
to be presented at 24 fps.
Colouring the
Endurance
“We did a lot of
research around the colour of clothing, the colour of ships and other textiles
and materials of the voyage,” explains Josh Norton, Founder, and
creative director at New York based creative agency BigStar (styled BGSTR) which
previously worked on Free Solo. “We standardised those colours and spent
weeks digital crafting each frame with some advanced software and AI to get to
our final result.”
They determined that AI was not of a high enough fidelity to do all the work. “You
can do an okay job quickly using straight out of the box AI approaches and
effects - and there's a lot of different packages out there that do that,”
Norton says, “but the amount of control that we needed to stay true to the
material and to give a consistent result needed a large amount of manual craft
work.
“This includes tracking
clothing, and having just the right Burberry green for all the parkas, making
sure that there was no fluctuation in the tones on the painted surface of the Endurance.
There’s a degree of exactitude that needs to be achieved when it comes to the
details of the tactile nature of that world. Every piece of linen and rope,
every piece of wood, all the hair on the dogs, and the colour of the clothes
needed very specific attention. AI processes as they exist right now cannot
afford that attention.”
Norton says, “A
wash technique really allows the black and white imagery to create all the
value and contrast difference within the frame. We're just simply adding colour
rather than adding any other kind of visual information or overriding the black
and white. We didn't want to create a highly saturated result. We wanted the
material to still feel aged.”
BigStar also did
graphic design and title sequence for the show as well as taking in all the survey
data and high rez photography to create a 3D model of the wreckage.
“The 3D model
serviced several points throughout the film as far as explaining the status of
the wreck and also giving us material for the title sequence itself,” Norton
says.
Exploration and human endurance
The doc finds parallels with Shackleton's story and the
recent expedition to find the sunken ship. “Thematically they were very similar,”
says Eisenhardt. “Both expeditions got stuck in the ice, they suffered ups and
downs and harsh weather. Both are tales of friendships. To make the story work,
you had to find specifics that kind of spoke to each other. The idea of
exploration as pushing the boundaries is a universal theme. But finding those
moments in both the Shackelton footage and the new expedition that ‘talk’ to
each other so that it would enhance both stories takes a lot of time. It took
months to figure out the right percentage of each story to include.”
Footage of the 2022 expedition itself amounted to over 500
hours, the bulk of which was from shooting three cameras onboard the remote
operated submarine that would spend six hours at a time underwater searching
for and filming the wreck. The film’s co-director Natalie Hewit was onboard the
Agulhas II to supervise.
“We watched everything, literally,” says co-editor Simona
Ferrari. “We had a team that went through the footage shot 3000 meters below
sea level so instead of having six hours’ worth we got maybe 2-3 hours per dive.”
AI brings Shackelton’s voice to life
The documentary also narrates portions of the 1914-16
expedition in the words of Shackelton and his crew who all kept diaries. “There
were thousands and thousands of pages, some of it unpublished,” Eisenhardt
relates. “All that had to be copied and sorted for the best material and from
there we began a discussion about AI. It was a real discussion about whether using
AI to voice their words was the proper thing to do. Our conclusion, was that AI
is the perfect tool for this situation.”
The alternative might be to have some celebrity or actor pretend
they're Shackleton but if they could use AI to replicate his voice speaking
words he wrote, that felt closely to the truth.
It was easier said than done though. The only recording of
Shackleton’s voice lasts just four minutes and was made on an Edison Phonograph
wax cylinder.
“The noise on the recording was as loud as
his voice, and he was speaking strangely since he was projecting into a giant
megaphone. It was unusable.”
They turned to Ukrainian AI voice specialists Respeecher
which, among other work, had resynthesized Mark Hamill’s voice for a young Luke
Skywalker in an episode of The Mandalorian. They were able to scrub away
the noise to leave a clean vocal track. Meanwhile, the crew’s diaries were
whittled down to the raw material that they could exact dialogue from. They
hired an actor with a neutral accent to record the dialogue, giving the
appropriate intonations, from Respeecher made a model. They then applied their
AI app using the voices of Shackelton and his crew.
“Everybody knew the story of The Rescue because it had been headline news for
over a week. People know the outcome of Shackelton’s heroism. I think what
matters to me is finding out who these people are and what makes them tick.
That means digging deeper into the characters and wondering why did what they
did. We started from asking what their motivation is to do what they do and we
build up from that.”
The same filmmaking team are already embarked on another project, this one
about climbing Everest.
History
of South
The
original footage from South was donated to the BFI in the 1950s and the
archive began to restore it back in 1994. There was no one complete original
negative source for South.’ Overall, 99 different copies of film relating to
Shackleton in the Antarctic, varying in length and age, were examined to piece
together a restored version as authentically as possible.
The
restoration used original camera neg from the expedition, prints from the sound
reissue, nitrate release prints from the EYE Filmmuseum in the Netherlands with
colour tinting, as well as 18 photographic glass slides.
The
original photochemical techniques for colour tinting and toning were also
recreated by the conservation team. This was completed in 1998, then digitally
remastered for the film’s centenary, with renewed intertitle cards and a newly
commissioned score by Neil Brand, in 2019.
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