Truly Amazing.

[Kronos]

Just watched this and Jesus I knew trenches were tough but not for a moment could I have imagined how tough, boots freezing on your feet, rats and lice, crap food, men literally drowning in mud, no change of clothes, even your rest days spent working your bum off back at the supply depot.

The colour certainly worked for me though and can now understand why it was shown in the late evening rather than earliest as some of the shots of the dead soldiers and horses were quite horrific.

Though there was much naivety and understatement of the dangers to these young men/boys I was in awe of the humour that shone through.

Wonderful program.

 

[adam cool dude]

Managed to catch this last night. Was blown away when they panned it out into colour. It is things like this that should be winning Oscars.

 

[Conscript]

Started watching this on iPlayer last night. It was very interesting to begin with anyway, but the part where it switched to the colourised footage was incredible. The way it's been done, with overlaying appropriate audio, makes it so much more life-like and repeatable, you'd be forgiven for thinking some of the footage was only a couple of decades old (the content notwithstanding of course).

I'll finish watching it tonight.

 

[Ayahuasca]

Yep, I think with black and white footage it sort of distances you a bit from those events, as soon as it becomes colourised it adds a sense of reality, especially with the superb audio overlay work they've done.

 

[Conscript]

Yeah, I was watching thinking "Surely these must have been silent films?", but apparently they used lip readers to work out what was being said and used voice actors to record audio to dub in. I haven't got to this bit yet, but apparently there's a part where an officer is reading a speech before a push and they actually found a copy of it in some archives, so they recorded new audio to overlay.

Incredible attention to detail. I think I'd be just as interested if they did a 'making of'.