LOOKING BACK TO THE FUTURE

Did you see Peter Jackson’s astonishing First World War documentary They Shall Not Grow Old last week?

It was on limited release in cinemas, but also shown on BBC2 on November 11 - the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War.

Jackson and his team were given access to the Imperial War Museum’s archival footage and painstakingly restored it. In fact, it’s more than restoration, it’s modernisation. They worked out what speed each roll of film was shot at and standardised it all to 24 frames per second, removing that jerky Chaplin-esque effect all too common to archive video. They took the grainy, murky footage and brought it into HD, sensitively colourising it along the way.

They buffed up the audio that had been captured. In other places where there was no audio, they used lip readers and voice actors to convey what the men on screen were saying.

It’s a remarkable achievement and incredibly powerful. Weird to think that before he became a prestige filmmaker, Jackson was best known for splatter films Bad Taste and Braindead. Work like They Shall Not Grow Old and the Lord of the Rings trilogy may have larger audiences, but his early stuff has a sizeable following, who will be pleased to hear that he’s using some of the skills learned in recent work to tart up his older movies.

That means Bad Taste, Braindead and even Meet the Feebles are going through a 4K restoration process. Jackson said: “Anything from those films that is available is, like, 1990s Telecine things, which is the best that we had… and compared to now, they look awful.

“I just haven’t re-released them because, if I do, I want them to look really good. We’ve actually done some experiments. They look fantastic. They look like they’re shot on 35mm.

So yeah, what we’ll do now is.. get really nice 4K copies of these fully restored and back out into circulation again,”

Good news for those who prefer their horror a little less realistic than the atrocities of the First World War.

Peter Jackson