- Title: Peter Jackson, "Lord of the Rings" to World War One
- Date: 8th November 2018
- Summary: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM (OCTOBER 9, 2018) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) DIRECTOR, PETER JACKSON, WHEN ASKED ABOUT PROCESS OF WORKING WITH ARCHIVAL MATERIAL, SAYING: "Well the, the big job is restoring the black and white to black and white, you know, to get from from bad black and white to good black and white is actually where most of the of the work is. And, and you've got to do it as a multi faceted thing, it's sharpening, it's getting rid of scratches, getting rid of grain, changing the speed, getting rid of splices. Sometimes you lose three or four frames and a splice, you've then got to have the computer create those, those three or four frames. What's actually pretty amazing now is that a computer, because it was also changing the speed so imagine, you know, everything's being screened at 24 frames but some of the stuff was shot 14, 15, 16 frames, 10 frames and so you're now asking the computer to create the extra frames in between the ones that are there, which amazed me how well they can actually do it now. You know you can actually have can have a computer, if you tell the computer this is 15 frames a second but we want it to be 24 (frames a second) the computer without, you just press a button, there's no human involvement. The computer will actually generate, it will take the frame before the frame after, it'll generate these frames that don't exist with the original material and create its own frames. And it comes, it's incredible, results that you get. And then the colorization is, there's nothing difficult about the colorization, but it's just very labour intensive. It's just you know the bit, the more you spend on it, the more time you spend on it, the better you get, that's really the simple thing with the colour work. Because the war was a colour war, that was the purpose of what we were doing was to try to make a film where you're listening to the people that were there and you're seeing it as they saw it and they saw it in colour, not in black and white obviously."
- Embargoed: 22nd November 2018 11:01
- Keywords: Peter Jackson They Shall Not Grow Old soldiers WW1 First World War Lord of the Rings
- Location: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- City: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
- Country: United Kingdom
- Topics: Arts / Culture / Entertainment,Film
- Reuters ID: LVA00495N8E3D
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: NOTE TO EDITORS: THIS STORY ORIGINALLY RAN ON OCTOBER 9, 2018 - THIS IS A RE-PUBLISHED STORY - NUMBER 4013
For his new World War One documentary film, "They Shall Not Grow Old", director Peter Jackson was adamant the soldiers should tell their own stories.
To do that, the acclaimed New Zealand director hired forensic lip-readers to go through old silent film footage of the war and uncover the conversations that took place in the trenches and on the battlegrounds 100 years ago.
Those words were mixed with interviews with former soldiers from 600 hours of tape in the BBC archives to create a documentary that includes only the words of the soldiers themselves, in a full-colour war as they would have seen it.
"There's been lots of documentaries made on the First World War...and I just decided for this one to strictly just use the voices of the guys that fought there," Jackson, director of the "Hobbit" and the "Lord of the Rings" series told Reuters on Tuesday (October 9). "So no historians, no narration, no nothing."
Old film was meticulously restored. Computers were used, not only to add colour to black and white footage, but to remove imperfections, fill splices and reconstruct missing frames from film that was shot with fewer frames per second than today.
Forensic lip readers, who usually work with the police determining what people say on silent security camera footage, were able to decipher the words spoken long ago on film.
Actors were hired to give the soldiers on screen a voice. The film will have its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival next week.
"It's not the story of the war," said Jackson. "It's the story of the human experience of fighting in the war." - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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