“It was that Serbia business wasn’t it – Serbia where that chap was shot,” we hear one of many voices say. The comment echoes a fuzziness most of us share at that old question: “?”
But this time the query is raised by a real soldier who marched in France, who sat in the trenches, dodged shells and got shot at. Thanks to an astounding documentary by Peter Jackson, , there should never again be any fuzziness about what he and so many others endured.
War stories restored
He slimmed down more than 100 hours of footage from the Great War, provided by the UK’s Imperial War Museums, to just under 100 minutes. And the resulting film tells the story of men who enlisted, in their own words.
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The interviews were recorded decades ago but the soldiers’ plain-spokenness combined with the crystal clear restored sound makes it seem as if they were speaking yesterday. Anecdote after anecdote is paired with imagery that has also been meticulously restored.
When digital copies of old film first arrived at the offices of production firm Stereo D, based in California, it was loaded with challenges: dust and scratches, missing frames and jittery sequences shot at varying frame rates.
The dust could be removed with the help of algorithms, but technicians often found that they had to tweak the level for each shot because the results sometimes looked clean but blurred.
Gaps in the record
Then there were the gaps left in footage. Producer Mark Simons explains: “There were severe examples where close-up shots would be missing five frames, where a person was turning their head and we would have to invent those in-between frames.”
Software could duplicate existing frames to allow digital artists to manually create the missing transitions. In the finished sequence, people and objects move more naturally. This correction allowed for a consistent frame-rate, which fixed the speed of people caught on film.
Colourful challenges
As for colour, Jackson wanted as much accuracy as possible – from details on weapons to landscapes. Park Road Post Production, a New Zealand firm that also worked on the film, collected clothing from the era. “We had samples of all the uniforms so we could colour-match everything,” says Jon Newell, a colourist at the company.
Black and white film has been colourised before, but engineers working on They Shall Not Grow Old found themselves being asked to raise the bar by Jackson. “It was painstaking,” recalls Simone, “we would submit things over and over again until it was right.”
One of the innovations he and his team developed was a digital tool nicknamed the “palette tool” that could link together all the patches of a particular colour across a frame or series of frames.
Uniform matching
For example, with portions of a uniform the shade could be adjusted instantly so there was no need to make changes by hand. Even so, much of the work still had to be done by hand. Several hundred technicians were involved from Stereo D alone. The firm uses production software that allows distant teams around the world to share footage quickly as they work on it.
The result is a stunning combination of clean, clear footage that has been speed-corrected, stabilised and coloured. Many shots look like they were filmed in technicolour just a few decades ago, and there are only a few places where the limitations of grainy original footage still show.
Finding their voices
The film’s narrative is formed from the interviews with soldiers recalling the trenches. However, the archive footage lacked an audio track so Park Road Post Production added sound effects and hired professional lip-readers to discover what soldiers were saying to each other. Dialogue was newly recorded and added in.
One moment stands out. A grinning soldier peers into the camera before laughing, turning to his mates and saying: “We’re in the pictures!” It’s not his voice, but it might as well have been. The sensitive additions capture the extraordinary cheerfulness of men living through some of the worst conditions imaginable.
The oldest question
We hear memories of burning lice eggs to rid clothing of them, of scavenging for mouldy biscuits in abandoned trenches – and the indignity of using open latrines dug in the ground. But there are also true horrors, with soldiers watching as their friends’ faces were blown off, or staring at the harrowing spectacle of dead men rotting on barbed wire.
Thanks to the film, we witness a fragment of those horrors a century later – and repeat the question we hear one soldier ask: “Why did it have to happen?”
They Shall Not Grow Old is showing at UK cinemas now. Its TV premiere is at 9.30 pm, BBC2, Sunday 11 November
