The Imperial War Museum asked Peter Jackson if anything could be done about cleaning up World War I footage, and Peter Jackson said yes.
The results are stunning.
Looks great.
I will note it is slightly ironic that the thing Jackson’s films most often need more of, is precisely the role Jackson is serving as a glorified version of.
A editor.
But I am interested to see how this goes.
Aw, man, I clicked on this thread hoping for some sort of Lovecraftian cosmic horror movie. Instead, I just find boring ol’ history.
-Tom
I mean, seriously, it’s not even the cool world war. It’s the outdated old one that no one cares about.
-Tom
Colorized? I mean, honestly, what is this? 1985?
So Peter Jackson does the Imperial War museum a pro-bono solid and you scoff at him like he’s Ted Turner befouling Hawkes’ masterpiece?
OK…Good Night California…Navaronegun needs to go to sleep, evidently…
I get where Tom’s coming from though, the title totally sounds like a Bradbury novel or something.
Haha, you got that idea from Cultist Simulator, didn’t you?
Fascinating to see the original footage next to the updated. I hadn’t thought of the frames per second and interpolation/compositing.
Yeah, I had never put that together in my head about that being the reason that footage looked other-wordly, so to speak.
No, 1914 - 1918.
I still don’t like the colorization; seems too washed out, not enough saturation, and funky flat contrast to really work properly. The frame interpolation is great though, I wish they’d re-do a lot of the original footage like this (not to mention superbly cleaned up) and not make it look like the crappy frame-smoothing you get on TVs.
Jackson has always been interested in WW1, and he filmed a short using the first Red digital camera just to see how it would do, so I’m glad he’s gone back to it.
— Alan
Yeah, some of it doesn’t quite look right to me either. I’m not sure it’s a saturation thing, though yeah, contrast could be a factor. It looks at times like the hue slider has been nudged so the colours look a bit off/unreal.
To be fair, all this has to be incredibly difficult to get right and it’s fascinating to see someone taking a good shot at it.
Longer trailer. Amazing.
On one hand it doesn’t look perfectly natural. On the other hand, holy hell what an impressive achievement. This seems like a true labor of love by Jackson (and many others).
Is it really only playing in theatres for 2 different days?
This was showed by the BBC on the evening of Remembrance Sunday. Perhaps the sombre tone of the day played a part, but for me it totally worked. I found it thoroughly affecting, unflinchingly brutal at times, beautifully constructed, mostly unsentimental and, above all, surprising. We are taught from an early age that WW1 was a time of undiluted brutality - what this showed was some of that, yes, but also the moments of levity and overall sense of adventure experienced by young men at war. The post-colourised “coda” (if you like) was for me the heart of the piece. I wont spoil it. Watch it if have any interest in the Great War.