Peter Jackson restored and colourized hours of WW1 footage for new documentary

Academy Award-winner Peter Jackson—who you may know for directing The Lord of the Rings trilogy, or perhaps even his earlier slapstick-gore B movie classics—spent the last four years working on restoring and colourizing 100-year-old First World War footage from the UK's Imperial War Museum to produce a documentary with narration by the veterans themselves as recorded by the BBC in 1964. The 90-minute documentary, entitled They Shall Not Grow Old, will premiere on October 16 at the BFI London Film Festival and is later scheduled to air on November 11 on the BBC.

His grandfather being a veteran of the war in question, Jackson admits to have always been interested in WW1 and that he worked on the project for free "as a labour of love." It's reported that the effort restored close to 100 hours of original WWI footage from the Imperial War Museum and had available interviews from 120 veterans recorded by the BBC in the early sixties.

According to Jackson, the bulk of the work by his team at WingNut Films was on restoring the black and white film: things like removing scratches and film grain, sharpening the image or changing the framerate. Getting the colours right for the colourization process involved access to contemporaneous pictures of crowds and to collections of actual WW1 uniforms. On top of that, the original footage was silent, so general ambience sounds had to be added and forensic lip readers and voice actors were hired to recreate what the soldiers were captured saying in the original film. For narration, Jackson decided to rely only on the original protagonists of the conflict thanks to 600 clips of interviews recorded by the BBC in 1964.

"It was a war in full colour," said Jackson in an interview "if you were a soldier there, it was a full-colour war." Adding that he "wanted to simply give people this feeling, as accurately as I could, to what it was like to be in that war, just what it was like from a human point of view."

While it seems the documentary will have a limited release in the UK only, I thought the project was interesting enough for us to keep an eye out for whenever it gets some kind of worldwide release.

Sources:

"They Shall Not Grow Old: Peter Jackson brings First World War to life with poignant restored footage" at iNews

"First World War footage brought to life by Peter Jackson" at The Irish Times

"Peter Jackson Restored and Colorized 100 Hours of World War I Footage, and the Final Results are Remarkable" at IndieWire

"'There was no feeling sorry for themselves': Director Peter Jackson on the soldiers of the First World War" at History Extra