Incredible colorised footage has brought the First World War to life after a painstaking project to memorialize British troops by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson.
Grainy video of soldiers in the bloody battle has been carefully remastered and turned into color footage for the first time to mark the centenary of the conflict between 1914 and 1918.
Three-time Oscar-winning Lord Of The Rings film-maker Mr Jackson used 100-year-old footage from Imperial War Museum archives to show it in previously unseen detail.
Over four years the award winner edited hundreds of videos to produce the final piece, which masterfully melts black and white scenes into brightly colored clips.
Jackson said: 'I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more - rather than be seen only as Charlie Chaplin-type figures in the vintage archive film.'
The 90-minute film is narrated with interviews from 120 veterans, from 600 clips recorded in 1964. New Zealand director Jackson was adamant the soldiers should tell their own stories.
Old film was meticulously restored. Computers were used, not only to add color to black and white footage, but to remove imperfections, fill splices and reconstruct missing frames from film that was shot with fewer frames per second than today.
Forensic lip readers, who usually work with the police determining what people say on silent security camera footage, were able to decipherthe conversations that took place in the trenches and on the battlegrounds 100 years ago. Actors were hired to give the soldiers on screen a voice.
'There's been lots of documentaries made on the First World War...and I just decided for this one to strictly just use the voices of the guys that fought there,' Jackson, director of the 'Hobbit' and the 'Lord of the Rings' series told Reuters on Tuesday.
'It's not the story of the war. It's the story of the human experience of fighting in the war.'
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