They Shall Not Grow Old brings the Great War to life like never before. (Trafalgar Releasing)

Additional cinema screenings of They Shall Not Grow Old are taking place across the country on the 9, 10 and 11 November ahead of the TV broadcast on BBC 2 at 9.30pm on Sunday, 11 November. Check local listings for details.

Peter Jackson, the visionary filmmaker best known for his adaptations of The Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, has taken a break from directing Hollywood films, dedicating the last four years to the First World War Centenary.

The 56-year-old New Zealander was the creative force behind The Great War Exhibition in Wellington, an extensive and immersive look at the First World War that spanned 1914-1918, featuring many items from the filmmaker’s personal collection of artefacts from the conflict.

Read more: Peter Jackson: ‘Great War veterans didn’t want our pity’

The centrepiece of his work commemorating the end of the Great War though is They Shall Not Grow Old, a startling new documentary. The feature-length film (in cinemas 16 October for one day only) combines restored archive footage shot during the conflict with veterans’ interviews captured in the 1960s by the BBC, bringing the stories of the men that fought in the war to life like you’ve never seen or heard before.

The film footage, shot largely on the front line, has been painstakingly cleaned, colourised, converted into 3D, and given audio by Jackson’s team.

The final effect is astonishing. Watch a taster of the converted footage below.





Where once the shaky, grainy, over-cranked, silent footage alienated modern viewers, placing the events of the Great War in a bygone era, this new footage looks like it could have been shot yesterday.

The Great War is now bright, vivid, full of life, humour, and humanity, bridging the 100-year gap in an unprecedented way.

It was a mammoth task though for Jackson, and visual effects company Stereo D who handled the conversion, and they needed to get their hands on as much footage as possible.

“I wanted to have as much [film footage] as I could,” Jackson tells Yahoo Movies UK. “Because you just never know. I didn’t want it to be limited, by saying ‘give me some of your best film’. So I just asked the IWM [Imperial War Musueum] to give me everything they had, within reason.”

“I think we must have ended up with over one hundred hours of film and we ended up with about six hundred hours of audio, from veterans’ interviews.”

How the footage was restored: Transformation





The restoration of the film fell into three key phases – transformation, colour creation, and stereoscopic 3D conversion.

“The public’s interpretation of that time is heavily influenced by the quality of the historical footage available; black and white, scratched up, highly deteriorated material that has been ravaged by time,” explains Milton Adamou, Stereo D’s Head of Post and Colourist for the project.

“It was our job to eliminate these restrictions by transforming this material to the highest standard, and thus contextualise the historical records in a modern, more vibrant and lifelike way for the first time.”

The Imperial War Museum sent everything they had to Park Road Post, Jackson’s New Zealand-based post-production facility, where artists completed an initial black and white levelling pass on the original images. Some footage was too bright (overexposed), some too dark (underexposed), so this first process aimed to make all the original black & white footage look the same, or thereabouts.



(Use the slider above to see the footage before and after restoration)

Next came the process of cleaning up the footage to remove dust, scratches, tears, chemical marks, and other defects. The footage was then all standardised to smooth out the level of grain – the subtle texture of film – as some footage was very grainy due to its primitive nature, while some needed more grain to make it appear sharper.

Finally, Stereo D then had to retime all the footage. At the time, film footage was shot at 13 frames per second, as opposed to the modern standard of 24 frames per second, hence why it often looks jerky and over-cranked. Now the footage plays more smoothly, at the standard cinema frame rate we’re used to, giving the soldiers more lifelike movement.

How the footage was restored: Colour

Peter Jackson worked with historian Pete Connor to ensure historical accuracy at every stage. His input proved to be most invaluable during the colourisation phase. Connor provided Stereo D with detailed notes for each shot identifying each soldier’s rank, uniform colours, what each item should look like.



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