They Shall Not Grow Old ~ Documentary

bluethrunthru said:
In all honesty I was a bit underwhelmed. I think it was a mixture of the hype and the fact that there have been so many Great War documentaries on TV in the last week. I intend to give it a week and rewatch on iplayer as I suspect it will have more of an impact then - today it just came across as a colourised version of what was wall to wall TV - shame really.
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Couldn't disagree more. When you say hype what were you expecting.

The colourised film bought it to life, the original (speeded up, black and white) footage doesn't convey the horrors of what they went through.
 
HellYeah said:
Couldn't disagree more. When you say hype what were you expecting.

The colourised film bought it to life, the original (speeded up, black and white) footage doesn't convey the horrors of what they went through.
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It has been reviewed and what not since cinema release - I think I have just seen so much WW1 stuff in the run up - there are other documentaries that are colourised and a thing with Fergal Keane flying over the battlefields - all in colour too - as I say I think I need to revisit and re-assess once the overload has died down within me.
 
bluethrunthru said:
It has been reviewed and what not since cinema release - I think I have just seen so much WW1 stuff in the run up - there are other documentaries that are colourised and a thing with Fergal Keane flying over the battlefields - all in colour too - as I say I think I need to revisit and re-assess once the overload has died down within me.
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I think you've got to take into account the sheer amount of work that went into this one.

Before they even started tackling the process of colourising the film, they had to trawl through hours of recorded interviews with WWI veterans and then find footage to complement the interviews, then they had to lip-read the words that were being spoken in the footage and add voices and sound effects to it.

There have been other colourised documentaries but they're fairly crude in the main, some of the colourised footage in this film looked like it had actually been shot in colour to start with and the idea of slowing the film down and overdubbing sound really brought it to life.

There's a programme about the making of the film on BBC4 at 7.30pm tonight: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0brzngq
 
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Magicpole said:
At school we covered WW1 in history and it included this poem, it is my favourite of all the war poems of that war. Even as a kid I was shocked at how Haig could be such a fucking arse with tactics that ensured so much carnage.

This poem for me sums up the futility and utter waste of the war to end all wars.
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My favourite too mate. We are off to Berlin on Saturday to pay respect to my wife’s great uncle who died 100 years ago in a pow camp. Of all things it was Spanish flu that got him a couple of days before armistice.
 
The bit that got me was the veteran talking about finding a man in agony one of his own, who he shot to save him anymore pain, Christ the pain in his voice was palpable, he would have lived with that forever, god bless him for doing that.
 
I thought it was very powerful, it put the viewer in the trenches with them,

it made me smile when the guy said, when he got on the transport ship he was a corporal, but heard that NCO's were the most common casualties, so he went in the toilet, took off his stripes and came out as a private.

The part that will stay with me is towards the end, when they showed you a still picture of a squaddie, followed by a picture of a dead body in the mud, really brought it home.
 
when I was young there plenty of men around who fought in ww1and I must have met a few of them, guess at that age you never think about what they went through
 
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