They Shall Not Grow Old is a film created with state of the art technology that enhanced and colorized black and white video footage from WW1.  Directed by Peter Jackson, a decorated director, with a team of video, audio and music specialists were able to create a film that allowed the viewers to see original, real imagery in a dynamic and more relatable movie aesthetic.  Documentaries of old war movies tend to be static, black and white footage that is running too quickly or too slow, with no noise except the historians that are speaking over the clip.  Between the techniques themselves and the decisions why Jackson chose those techniques create a fascinating digital project in history.  

Jackson and his team received over 100 hours of audio and over 60 hours of video that they had to watch and listen through to decide what they were going to use for their 99 minute film.  After watching dozens of hours of video Jackson decided that he was going to focus on the film provided by the English to base his film off of.  The English video alone was far too many hours, and his next step was figuring out what the film was going to be about.  Coupled with countless hours of audio, he wanted to create a film that expressed and showed what the actual soldiers were like.  He did not focus on the strategies that went into the battles, or the actual battles themselves, rather he portrayed the day to day lives of actual soldiers.  We have all seen war movies and how the soldiers interact, however that is only how we think they do.  I believe Jackson did an amazing job of personalizing how the soldiers interacted and what they thought of the war before, during and after the fact. 

The audio that was used in the film was only recorded tapes of real veterans from the war speaking about their experiences.  Starting with the the months leading up to the war we got to listen and see the excitement that men and women had for the war.  With men as young as 15 passing for the draft and heading off the war, everyone believed that one English man was worth 10 of anyone else.  They believed they were invincible.  The beginning of the film was all black and white while they were talking about the pre war times.  Once the filming starts to show the armies of the United Kingdom, Jackson switched the videos to color.  Through a machine learning model that uses object classifying to change the color of videos pixel by pixel, it allowed images and videos to come to life.  They also utilized the use of video editing that was capable of making images lighter that were too dark to see anything, or darken images that were too bright to see anything.  

Finally, Jackson’s ability to show what the soldiers were actually thinking, how they acted really struck home to see for the first time what day to day life in war was really like.  At one point a soldier said (along the lines of), that there were very bad times there is no way around that, however in general, on good days of weather, or the time we spent off the line, were quite fun spending time with the boys and telling stories.  Men always tried to keep a level head and would cope with the pressures with comedy and jokes, trying to keep themselves sane.  And more interesting, is how the soldiers were very excited for war before actually entering the front line.  By the end they were wondering why they were even there in the first place.  We got to see what the soldiers thought of the enemy.  Movies regularly portray enemies as evil and heartless.  The clips of audio and video that show the interactions between German and English soldiers showed that they did not hate each other.  Germans were captured and helping the wounded English, making jokes and smoking cigarettes with the enemy. Soldiers said the Germans were normal people just like them, that they loved their families, were bakers and butchers just like them.  Jackson’s decisions coupled with the technologies used made it possible to create a movie like nothing I have seen, and portray real soldiers, real landscapes, and real interactions.