I got a chance to see this film on Saturday Night - upon recommendations from the Internet, I saw it in 3D, which you would think would totally suck but Peter's team really knocked it out of the park
For those of you who don't know about this film - it's a commission for a documentary about the 100th anniversary of the Armistice of WWI. In many ways, it reminds me of "For All Mankind" - the only voices are the voices of soldiers who gave their accounts after the war. There is no outside narration. Peter Jackson was given access to 100 hours of film archives to do what he could with it and right off the bat, he decided that he was going restore and colorize much of the documentary footage and move it to 3D
You start off with black and white - the stories of the boys going to war and then when they arrive at the front the film transforms into 3D and color and it literally made me go "whoa" This is a labor of love and dedication, and it shows in the finished product - this was also the first time I saw a 30 minute "making of" documentary at the end of the credits so you got extra insight into how this was done.
One of my favorite aspects of this was that some footage that has been passed by previously by TV producers for bad color (over or under exposed) could get full technology treatment and restoration so that it's immediately visible. One shot they showed look like a dark blob at night but upon restoration you see a daytime scene of an artillery crew going to town on the enemy, and you realize that this footage has never been seen really before now.
They also talked about the colorization process - and ironically, how the toughest part was probably grass and mud to get right - Peter Jackson even went to a sunken road where some of his footage was shot and took pictures of the same spot as it still stood to get a nice benchmark for the grass.
There has been some points made about the idea of altering this footage - Adam Gopnik wrote a piece for the New Yorker in which he addresses some of his concerns - I wouldn't call it criticism per se - I can understand the feeling - if this was, say, "Seven Samurai" - that was made 3D and colorized I'd lose my shit - but this isn't an artistic piece, it's documentary footage, so I really don't have a problem with seeing it as it would have been.
The other thing they did with this one was add sound - they had lipreaders come in - and ironically, a lot of the sound had to do with guys telling other guys - "Hey, we're gonna be on the movies" - LOL - but in the documentary there was some other great stuff discusses, such as them locating the form being read in one shot, where we finally know after 100 years what it was he was reading
I hope more of the restored footage makes it way to our screens someday - Peter Jackson's team restored all 100 hours, not just the 100 minutes they used, so at the least we should get pristine black and white prints into the domain soon I hope, but it's rare that I go to live movies, and even rarer still when they take my breath away and this one definitely did - and I'm not a 3d movie guy, so this was a special treat
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