YouSaid · the spoken record

Peter Jackson

lines on the record: 51
first: 2018-12-15
most recent: 2018-12-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Need you. And, you know, if you need to build a set, you get timber and you get nails and you hammer a set together and you paint it and you make it look like it's whatever it is, a piece of middle earth or a piece of ancient Rome or whatever it is. And computer technology is no different if you want to show something and you can't build a set because it's too vast what you're imagining or it's too huge or it's too expensive. You have a computer do it. It's no different to the timber and nails and paint approach in my mind.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, from that level, I don't actually get too obsessed with it because I literally don't know anything about it, so therefore I don't sit in bed at night and think about the code and the software and the pixels, and I don't do that. I don't think that all I think about a story and character. And I think what the technology is, it's just a step. It's a technique that you have available to tell a story. And I don't, you know, so I don't get obsessed with the technology. I make sure that I know where the development of it is so that if I want something to be on a film, I know that I'm not asking for something that's completely impossible. And it used to be impossible once a lot of things, but now it's sort of less so. It's really most of what you can imagine on your head you can actually do on film now. So to me, it's not, I mean, you know, the technology is no different than just any other aspect of filmmaking. You want to tell a story and you just tell the story as you.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, you know, the advantage of it, as you say, and as I've told you, I don't have any ability. I mean, I can't do this stuff if somebody said to me, sit down and, you know, transform this film or restore it or colorize it or create a dragon. I don't have a clue how to do it. I mean, I've just got people, very clever people that do it for me”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the camera filmed is one thing, but if you just glance past the camera with your own eyes and you saw this in color 3D, these images, that's what we're trying to sort of almost bypass the film and the camera, but still use the film, which is all we have, obviously, use the film to give a much more realistic impression of what would have been happening in front of that camera. And I love the fact that 100 years later there's technology that these guys back then would never have dreamed about. I mean, who would have ever thought if you were shooting on the Western Front in the First World War that 100 years afterwards that this computer check, which, I mean, it's almost as unbelievable to even think about it that these guys have no idea what was actually going to be possible in 100 years' time. I do love the idea that we're using all this technology, but we're using it to go back.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I mean, technology, I mean, everything's different. I mean, look, on one level, I kind of try and use technology in the modern films I make to simply, you know, show incredible things that, you know, in terms of the story, what's hindered by the script, like if it was a Tolkien script or the Mortal Engines film we've just made or King Kong or whatever it is, you know, I try and use technology to give people an escapist piece of entertainment at the movies and believable. But what I actually kind of like about this movie is it's almost the polar opposite in a weird way is that you're using technology today to try and make this film of a hundred years ago look as close to being what the cameraman saw. So, you know, if you can imagine you're a cameraman in the First World War and you're cranking the handle of the camera and you're filming and you're trying to stay alive.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of things you do, which are very complex. I agree. I mean, of all the options, of all the ability that we had to sort of do something we ended up with actually something that's almost the most simple. The most simple result, which is just have these soldiers through their archive tapes, which have, by the way, been in archives for 50 years, anybody could access these tapes and use them. I mean, it's not, I mean, we didn't discover a hidden stockpile of tapes they've been sitting there. And we just simply use soldiers. So I agree with you. It's very simple.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, a lot of people in this world are descended from people that fought in this war, that their DNA is in our bodies. We are so connected to them and it's an opportunity, and it is the last opportunity. I mean, those soldiers are gone, but the next generation hasn't and the next generation heard a lot of stories. It's the last opportunity we've got to actually for families, for individual families to collect their own family history. And that's what I hope that this film actually inspires.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who's no longer around? Now, I just hoped that, and this is what I, this is actually what I'm trying to hopefully achieve with the film. And it became sort of slowly dawned on me as I went through it, is that there's the last period of time that the younger people can ask their older relations, the elder members of a family, who did we have in the First World War? And I think if people can ask that question of the older members of their individual families, they're going to get all sorts of stories that in 20 years time they're going to be gone because that generation will have passed. And so I hope, I really, and because look, the First World War is, there's hundreds and hundreds of books, thousands of books written about the war. There's lots of documentaries. If you want to know about the First World War, there's all sorts of ways to find out. But I think it's more important right now and all that really, all that I was interested in is families, that we are all...”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I'll tell you what it became, and again, I'm not claiming any great genius thought at the beginning of this because I had no idea. But to me, what had evolved into all the different things that we've described is that to me it became apparent that the film I was really making, and I suddenly sort of realized this without actually having intended it particularly, the film that I was really making was a film in which people today, even though there's no survivors of the First World War, there was still the next generation. So in other words, what I mean by that is that if you have an elderly grandfather or great-grandfather, then it's possible, and it was a World War I.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, can I finish up with two different things is where you think sort of storytelling is going. But to finish up on this movie, what we're trying to do here is just tell the story of these people in a way that modern audiences could discern or what, to get to the heart of what they were doing.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it was. That was a really interesting thing because at first I thought it was actually them on tape. I couldn't tell. I mean, it was a really interesting way to tell a story, especially when they were going by them and the guy said, oh, we're on film now. And that's what he was saying. That is what he was saying. Especially around their mouse. It was really interesting to look, especially the teeth, actually. Some of the teeth were pretty awful. Well, yeah.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a lot of detective work to figure out okay, well, we're looking at a regiment, we're looking at a Norfolk regiment, so therefore we're going to find an actor in Norfolk who can recite the lines and we're going to fit those with the lips. And you know that the lip readers got it right because they actually do fit.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't know what they were saying. We would send it to, we had two or three of these clever forensic lip readers who were working with us to help us. And they would come back with a written thing and say, well, this is what we think this guy's saying. And then what we had to do then is we had to work out what the regiment was, because as you can imagine, in the UK, there's a wide range of regional accents, and you can't have some, you know, even if you know what a soldier's saying or the lip readers, people tell us that this soldier is saying this, you can't take a Yorkshire or a Lancashire regiment and record a voice of someone from Kent or London or Somerset because it just won't fit because the rhythm is so different, the vowels are so different. So we had to then do a whole range of research to figure out where these guys came from. And each of these shots, and often there's no record.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All that we had were their lips moving, and obviously we have no record of what they were saying. So we managed to find some forensic lip readers. And I had no idea these people actually existed, but there is a group of people, a very small group of people, who read lips of silent footage, mainly for law enforcement. So if there's a security camera footage of a break-in, of a bank or a shop, and you've got the robbers sort of, you know, because there's a drop recording sound, but the security cameras are showing them doing what they're doing, then they try to read the lips of what they're saying to get clues of who they are so they can catch them and solve the crime. And there was a small group of people that are incredibly skilled, unbelievably talented at looking at moving lips and figuring out what these guys are actually saying. And so we sent all of our shots anytime we had somebody, a soldier on camera, talking.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trek that sounds realistic. And part of that was the difficulty, I guess the hardest part of that. I mean, it's easy to add horse hooves and gunfire and all the jingling and the jangling of the equipment. That's the easy part. The hard part was when we had soldiers talking.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've got a very good team who won Academy Awards for adding sound to silent pictures because people don't really realise that when you're dealing with these modern effects movies like the Hobbit movies or the Lord of the Rings, a lot of the footage is actually silent. If you've generated a shot of a dragon of Schmaug in his gold chamber with thousands of coins that are throwing around and jingle, then that shot comes to us as a silent shot. There's no sound recorded. It's silent. And so we have a sound department who look at it and add minute detailed sort of sound effects to it to make it seem real. So I was able to throw all this footage at that same team of people and say, please just give me a soundtrack that makes it sound like we were there, that there was a sound recording, all the sounds that we see on screen. Don't add any artistic flourishes to it. Just simply give us a sound.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, it goes back to that initial, well, it wasn't the initial concept, it was actually a concept that came about once we restored the footage and things, is that we decided that we have to present this film as realistically as we can in the sense of making the film, which has always been black and white, it's always been jerky, it's always been scratchy, making the film look like it was shot today, but it was shot 100 years ago, so it's like almost like a time travel situation. And to do that is, in addition to the colorizing of the footage and the 3D dimensionalization of the footage, we needed to have sound because it's obviously silent footage. And if we really wanted to go to achieve what became our agenda, which is to show this the way that as close as possible to what the soldiers would have experienced sound was a very important thing because certainly they heard sounds as well as saw these images. So fortunately, again, back in...”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To go into your bloodstream and you're going to die. So they had to chop off their feet. So that's just a, it's just one of the things amongst many other hardships that these soldiers had to deal with. And obviously the army were fixated on trying to keep their feet dry. So they introduced whale oil. They bought pots of whale oil in and got the soldiers to smear their feet in their whale oil, then put their socks on, then put more oil on, then put their boots on in an effort to try to sort of fend off the water from rotting their feet.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you were standing in water for weeks and weeks, weeks on end. And this is like during the winter months. It wasn't always like that. In the summer it was dry. But during the winter months when the rains came in, the soldiers had little choice but to have their boots in their feet immersed in water, mud, and with little relief. So everything would be saturated in water. And it doesn't take long. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm not entirely sure, to be honest, how long it takes. Within a reasonably short time, I imagine a week or two, your feet begin to rot. They literally, I mean, it sounds awful. And it is awful, but they rot. And when they rot, gangrene sets in. And in the first World War, it was known by a name. It was called Trench Feet. And if you had trench feet, you basically had rotting feet and there's only one way to fix it because the gangrene set in is going to kill you.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing with trench feet is it's basically gang green. And I mean, we used to, in the modern world, we often see images of gangrene from mountaineers that are sort of climbing Everest and their feet get frostbite. So it's sort of in today's world familiar with it as being a product of frostbite and gangrene sits in and you've got to sort of imputate the toes or the legs. But in the First World War, The gangrene was a result of basically rotting feet.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, the feet, also the trench feet. And that's the, you know, people, I've read about that so much and then to see it, to actually see it in the way you colorize it was disturbing and fantastic at the same time.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I mean, I wasn't out to exploit anything, but at the same time, I think the opposite of exploitation is to sanitize. And I think it's equally important not to sanitize. And so, you know, I wanted to present, as I say, this film, I mean, it sort of found its own shape in a way over a period of time as we did everything I've described. But one of the things that was clear is that we should just simply be showing and hearing the soldiers talking about what they experience in this war. Unfortunately, one of the things I experienced was there were dead bodies lying all over the place. And if there's dead bodies lying around, then they're going to have a lot of blood on them. And it wasn't an attempt to sort of artistically push the film or to shock people. It was just an attempt to show it like they would have seen it.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I completely agree. I mean, you know, the colors of the military equipment like the tanks and the guns, that's a historically sort of known colours. In fact, there's museums in Belgium and London that have tanks that have not been restored. So you can see a tank in the actual original First World War painting is still on the tank. So that stuff is not hard to get right. And the, well, I mean, obviously, you know, the same thing. We know what blood's like. We know what the colour of blood is. It's not a debatable thing. But I agree with you. I mean, we used to seeing black and white shots of bodies lying on the ground. And once you add the blood, I mean, people bleed. When they get anybody, if you cut your finger in the kitchen, you bleed. And these guys, if they get bullets through them and shrapnel through them, they bleed a lot.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because this is a, you know, the Western Front, in terms of the British army, is not that vast. It's about 80 or 90 miles of land. And we know exactly where the trenches were. So it's not that hard to actually to pinpoint a black and white shot that was filmed in 1918, 1917, 1915. And it's not hard to actually stand in the exact spot where that cameraman was in and actually was filming that shot. And, you know, the hedges and the trees and the grass today would be no different to the colors that they were then or the mud. I took lots of photos of mud. And even though the trenches have gone and the, although it's actually not true, there are a lot of trenches still there. The muddy kind of shell holes have gone, the shell holes are all covered in grass now. But even so, there were silk fields, because it's like a farmland.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh no, I had a camera. No, I did slightly better than an iPhone. I had a proper 35. I mean, it was a digital camera, but it was a sort of a slightly bulkier Sony camera, in fact. But I was just taking photos. I'd just drive around, stop at a field, take a panoramic photo of that field, move and drive another mile or two, stop take a photo of that. And in some cases, I actually found the exact locations that some of our shots were.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because people think of the First World War as being a muddy grey overcast war, but it was fought for, you know, I mean, that was probably true of the winter months. But if you're looking at the Somme offensive or any of the battles that were fought during summer, then there was green grass, there was blue skies, it was fought under very bright, sunny conditions. But I still wanted to make sure that the vegetation of that particular part of the world, of the Somme area in France, in northern France and the Flanders area in Belgium, I wanted to make sure that we were showing the colours to be accurate to that part of the world.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we just, you know, we knew what those colors were, and we had to make them look as accurate as we could. But then we come to the landscapes because when you realize that there's the soldiers there with their uniforms, that's the easy part. But the bulk of the shots, sometimes the majority of the shot you're looking at is not army or military or soldiers, it's actually fields, it's trees, it's grass, it's sky. And so what I did, and I wasn't sure if I was being a bit insane, but about a year and a half ago, I rented a car and I drove around all by myself. It was just me alone by myself. I drove around the battlefields of the Solomon France, the battlefields of Flanders and Belgium. And I spent two or three days and I photographed thousands and thousands of photos of the fields, the trees, the hedges, the crops in the field.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For this film, black and white first shots that we colorize about 300. And if I could have spent twice as long, then the results were probably would have been twice as good. But obviously every film has a schedule and a budget that you have to stick to. But I was happy in the sense that we probably spent longer on colorizing this footage than anyone had done before. So in other words, we did get better results. And the colors themselves were, I wanted them to be accurate. Now, fortunately, we're dealing with the army. So, you know, back in New Zealand, I've got a big collection of First World War uniforms of all sorts, British, Germans. I've got artillery tanks, guns, I've got all sorts of things because I've been interested in the First World War my entire life and I've got a big collection of stuff. So the colors of the actual uniforms of the badges of the military equipment was pretty straightforward.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of color on it, like every blade of grass has got a slightly different shade, then the results become so much more real. And, you know, look, to be honest with you, if I could have spent twice as long on colorizing the shots.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you can say to people, well, you can spend three months doing this shot, then you're going to get a whole lot better result because the currently technology of the colorizing is not new. It's old. But the quality depends on the amount of time that you spend. Now, if anybody that's hearing this podcast, if you just lift your eyes up and you look around the room, you're not seeing seven or eight colors. You're not seeing eight or nine. You're seeing thousands of colors. Thousands of colors in all their shades and their nuances that you might have curtains that are green. Well, if you look at the curtains, they're actually 500 shades of green, even though they're the same as with the light and the shadow. It just creates a hollow. So what I realized with colorization is the longer you can spend on it and the more labor you can put into each shot and just add nuances and shades of color and shade.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the wizard was a little different in the sense that they shot the first 20 minutes or so with black and white film stock and then they switched to color film stock. I mean, in this particular case, there was no color film stock. It was all black and white. So we did have to resort to what they is known as colorization. I mean, the thing that I found, and I hadn't done this before, so again, I'm just learning and discovering as I go along, the thing I realized with colorization is that the technology of colorizing something has existed for quite a long time. But the quality is totally dependent on the amount of manpower or labor that you put into the job. So in other words, if you take a shot, a black and white shot, and you're going to colorize it, if you say we want this to be done in four or five days, which I suspect is what a lot of the colorizing we've seen is, you know, the budget requires it to be done at a certain amount of pace, then you get the result that's the best result that you can get for that four or five days.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was deliberate that the British government wanted to record this war for posterity and certainly for propaganda use as well, I must say. But I just felt that if a cameraman was packing their bags to go across the channel to the Western Front and somebody came in and said, okay, here's your film stock. Do you want the black and white film stock or do you want the color film stock, then they would have chosen the color film because their job was to record this war and as accurate a detail as they possibly could. So obviously they would have chosen color. But of course color didn't exist. So they didn't have that choice. They were only given black and white film. So to me, you know, converting this into color with the agenda basically of making it as close as we could approximate to what the soldiers themselves actually witnessed and saw that had no issue at all and it was it became a fairly”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Later smear sort of color over it, then you're actually defiling the artistic vision of the people that made that film. But that's not what you're dealing with here. You're dealing with people that the government hired, filmmakers that were government employees with the agenda of going to the Western Front in France and Belgium with their cameras and recording the First World War for posterity. It was the first time ever that a war could be recorded with a moving picture film. Obviously the American Civil War is a very famous in the sense that Matthew Brody and many other photographers were able to take photos. So it's the first war where we had black and white photos. The first world war is the first war that we really have film moving film.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Early 70s. And at the same time, I thought that as well as the men themselves telling their own story because they suddenly had come into such a sharp relief in terms of their humanity was just restored and they should be telling us their story. I also wanted the film to now become a reasonably accurate view of what they saw. And the veterans, you know, well, the men, I mean, not even the veterans, I shouldn't say that, the soldiers that were in the First World War, they didn't see this war in black and white. They saw it in color. And I know that colorization has got its sort of its detractors, which is fair enough. I mean, if you have a director in the 1930s that chose to use black and white film stock, a director of photography who carefully lit it to make the most of the black and white image. And you suddenly, a few decades,”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was so sharp, it was so clear, these people, the men were coming to life. They were human beings again. Then the film began to sort of piece itself together in my mind. The first thing that happened at that point was I thought, well, if the people who are being filmed are coming to life in such a sharp and intense way, then the only voices we should hear should be of the men that fought this war. So at this point, I went into back to the Imperial War Museum and the BBC and I asked them to send me all of the audio interviews they'd conducted with veterans of the First World War. And we're talking about audio interviews that were done in the 1960s and 70s. In fact, I actually said to them, don't send me anything from the 80s and 90s when these are very old men, because I didn't want the voices in this film to be ancient, sort of feeble old men. I wanted them to be a little bit younger than that in their late 60s.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the one thing I've got to say in a completely honest way is that I entered this project not knowing what I would be doing. You know, as I say, I was asked to do a film, asked to use the original footage in a unique and original way. And I really was just feeling my way through it. I didn't have a grand vision. I didn't sort of have a film that I hadn't in my mind for years and years that I wanted to make. I mean, I didn't. So this was a way of me sort of finding my way through it piece by piece. And so once we had restored the black and white footage to black and white, so we're still dealing in the black and white world.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of technological limitation or the damage of 100 years, then the result, which to me was incredibly surprising, although in hindsight it shouldn't have been surprising, was that the people that were there become human beings again. They're moving at the same speed as the bus, which means that we can see their body language, the nuances of their face. We can see every little twitch and expression that they do when they suddenly become real. So humanity comes back to the people that were being filmed. And it's a humanity that's been obliterated by the simple, the technological defects of a hundred years has made it impossible for us to connect in that way. And if you can remove that, you suddenly realize that just like us.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're using this old film and we've seen this old film, everybody in the world, I'm sure, most likely has seen First World War film at some point or another, and we know what it looks like. It looks like sped up, weird grainy-ish, you know, out of focus, splices, scratches. It just jumps all over the place. And so it sort of presents us with a view of 100 years ago, but through a fog of film damage and all the stuff that sort of presents, it's like a barrier between us and the actual people that were being filmed. It's a barrier of the fog of time and film damage is just like there is this thing that makes it very hard to connect with the actual human beings that were being filmed. So what I found, though, having restored it is that and you can get rid of all that. And, you know, if you can actually eliminate that fog, that barrier of...”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first part of your question, I'm a completely hopeless computer guy. I mean, if I can send an email, I feel I've had a fantastic day. I really am the last person in the world to look at for an e-computer expertise. I mean, all I can do is I can say to this team of much, much cleverer people than me, you know, we need this film which was shot at 13 frames a second to look like it was shot at 24. Can you please have a go at that and let me know when there's something to see? I mean, that's honestly, I mean, that's as far as my expertise extends. So I don't claim any knowledge of computers, any knowledge of actual side of it. All I can say is that you hire very, very clever people and you ask them to do what you'd like them to do and they go away, do it. And I can't even, I can't begin to describe to you what they actually do because I have no idea. I'm completely dense in that regard. But I mean, what I was trying to achieve, though, is the, I mean, to me, it was actually, it came down to one thing, which was...”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writers who write computer code and software. So largely what we do in the films we make, and this is like, you know, I'm discussing modern films like the Hobbit movies and things now, is that we would take off the shelf software that's available. And you often write sort of a plug-in If there's a particular thing that you want to do that the software isn't capable of doing, then you have your own Department of Software Writers to actually author little kind of plugins that you can plug into the commercial software. And so these guys set about looking at this old film and figuring out ways to correct it, to fix it. And obviously the results that we see here in the film.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What we have in New Zealand is, I mean, I've got a company called Park Road Post Production who does the post production of our films, but they also have a department of computer effects, guys. And so I knew that I had the best people in the world really to actually to pull this off. And so when I asked myself that question, which was like, how well can we restore this? I knew I had people that could actually devote themselves to try to do that. It involves, you know, that you take this film, you figure out what's wrong with it. And it's largely, as I say, damaged from 100 years of use and neglect and just general wear and tear. But it also involves, you can't actually just do it with off-the-shelf software. So one of the things we do have there is we have a department of co-”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And so you get this film. You tried this out with the film that you brought back to your students and explain where you are. You're in New Zealand. You have these very high level high-tech studios there in New Zealand that you've built.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I was led to believe in all the books I read that the sort of official speed of the silent film was 16 frames a second. But we quickly realized when we sort of analyzed the film, we realized it was so wrong that we had everything from 10 frames a second, 11, 12. A lot of it, 13, 14 frames a second, some of it 15, 16, occasionally 17 or 18 frames. But when you also think about it, you've got a cameraman who's on the shellfire or gunfire. I mean, they're trying to get as close to the action as they can. They're staying behind sandbags, but the heart rate and adrenaline they're experiencing, but I would imagine the speed that they're rotating that handle round to some degree. So, I mean, you can take it a 10-minute roll of film from the archive if it has 25 or 30 different shots in it. And every single shot is actually filmed at a different speed because the cameraman isn't really...”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the technology in World War I was pretty much the same as they were shooting obviously Charlie Chaplin films and D.W. Griffith's films and all those Hollywood films that were shot around that time. The camera, and I've only seen photos of... These cameras, but they're wooden boxes. That are about 18 inches square, six inches wide. They're on a tripod. They've got a lens. But the key thing that's different today is they didn't have a motor to run the film because there was no reason to do that because that only came in when they had sound, which is like 1927-28. So when you're dealing with the First World War, 1914 to 18, you're dealing with a camera in which the speed that the film has shot is entirely depending on the handle, on the side of the camera, that the cameraman at the time is rotating the handle around.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the film in their archive varies because they just have an archive of First World War film. So some of the film is like, you know, you have to imagine that all film originates with a cameraman filming the original negative. So he's got a camera, he's got negative 35mm neg in it, and he's filming. And obviously these guys were filming between 1914 and 1918. Now, since then some of the film has been in the archive has been has been copied and copied and copied and what they actually hold in the archive is not the original film anymore. It's a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate. And each time the grain builds up, sometimes they hold film that's a little bit nearer the original neg. I mean, you know, it sort of varies all over the place. So, I mean, the thing is, is that when you're looking at the hundreds of hours of film they have, you're also looking at hundreds of hours.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, using the computer software that we have now, they've managed to figure out ways to make this film look incredibly sharp, normal speed. The human beings in the film, you know, just emerge from the screen for the first time. So that was the very beginning of the way the project began. Okay.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often the footage in their archive is a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate, so it's got all this grain that's built up and And we sort of looked at each of these particular Areas of damage with the film and tried to figure out individual ways in which we could fix it. So each particular piece of damage had to have its own solution. So it took us quite a while and I had no idea what the results would be. But eventually after four or five months Puck Road Post, which is the company that I happen to New Zealand, they got me in to look at the results. And I was amazed. I mean, they had managed to figure out.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, you know, so it's sharp, it's clear, it's stable, it looks like the speed of the footage is what we would expect to see as a normal speed. It's just, you know, so I asked them to send me three or four minutes of film just to let me experiment for a few weeks. And they sent me four minutes of just sort of random First World War shots that they had scanned at 2K. And I'm in New Zealand at Park Road Post with our effects team and we set about sort of analysing the film, analyzing the problems with it. And the problems are a lot to do with the age of the film and the damage that's been done in the last 100 years, in the sense of scratches of the way the film's snapped and broken and spliced together and frames have been lost.”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dilemma. I mean, I've watched decades worth of First World War documentaries. They use the same film. It's jerky. It's fast. The soldiers look like Charlie Chaplin characters. It's scratchy. It's got breaks in it. And that's what I'm used to seeing. So fresh and original was a sort of a thing that I couldn't quite understand. They didn't have any real guidance for me. So I went back to New Zealand. thought about this for a few weeks. And what I wondered, and this was a question I asked myself, and it was a real question, I didn't know the answer to it because I've never done it before, is I started to wonder how well we could restore this old footage with all the computer tech that we have now. And I've never done it, so I didn't know. But I thought, can we actually make this 100-year-old footage look like it was shot?”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concept of doing a documentary that would be screening in the UK in November 2018, which is the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. So from my perspective in 2013, it was five years away, felt like a long time at that point. And they asked me if I was interested in doing the documentary. And there was an open agenda, really. It was like I could do anything that I chose to do. And their only proviso was that I used their archive footage. So they wanted to have their library of original First World War footage used. But the thing that threw me was they said that they'd like me to use their archive footage in a fresh and original way. And the words fresh and original kind of was a little bit of a...”
2018-12-15 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: How Peter Jackson’s team made WWI footage look new · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT