I didn’t realise at first that I was looking at actual First World War footage. Then I was like “oh.”
Comes out October 16th.
“Oh” is about right. If you’ve never seen it, track it down. The restoration is so well done it left me speechless, and that takes a lot of doing, as @dduane can confirm. :-)
IIRC, and in keeping with the usual Peter Jackson practice of having lots and lots of extra stuff to add later, there’s enough restored footage that WASN’T included in “They Shall Not Grow Old” to make at least one and perhaps two more films of the same length.
AFAIK he gifted that footage to the Imperial War Museum.
The amount of work it took to fix and restore this footage is BOGGLING.
The cameras they had in WWI were hand cranked boxes- so the frames per second VARIES- so that was just one piece of the puzzle to fix these shots and makes them look ‘modernly shot’- that’s why the footage looks so weird and quick sometimes.
Then to scrub it up and fix the inconsistencies in shots (such as missing frames) they’d have to 3-d map like faces/vehicles etc to pad out the inconsistent missing frames- but also to make the whole film 3D- and then would have to mess about with timing with speeding up/slowing down the scene so it played right.
They hired a full crew of lip readers to figure out what the dialogue was, had a full foley crew to make all the sounds of tanks/guns/horses etc that weren’t recorded etc. (There was no sound captured AT ALL so ALL of it is fabricated.)
Then they had to hand color every single frame- a painstaking process! It’s basically color rotoscoping (you know, like that movie A Scanner Darkly) only instead of painting over the whole thing, it’s tinting it.
It’s truly amazing what Studio ‘Stereo D’ achieved!
I took my boyfriend to see this a year ago in cinemas because it combines both his love of wars and comp lol
Even I a person who mildly cares about both was amazed by it. Its a very emotional film though and doesn’t really skimp on the trauma of war.
