One hundred years after the end of World War I, Britain’s Imperial War Museums (IWM), the arts program “14-18 NOW,” and the BBC planned an ambitious attempt to revive footage recorded more than a century earlier.
Peter Jackson, director of *The Lord of the Rings*, was chosen to undertake it. The completed *They Shall Not Grow Old* is neither a simple historical overview nor an explanation of tactics. It lets viewers directly experience “what it meant to stand on the battlefield as one soldier.”
Bringing Century-Old Footage into the Present
Jackson received roughly 100 hours of silent black-and-white footage held by IWM and about 600 hours of audio interviews with veterans previously collected by the BBC and IWM.
Initially planned as a short of about 34 minutes for Imperial War Museums, it grew into a feature documentary of roughly 99 minutes as the material yielded more stories. Jackson’s own grandfather had served in World War I, giving the project both personal devotion and a sense of historical mission.
The original title comes from a line in Laurence Binyon’s 1914 poem “For the Fallen.” Jackson aimed not for textbook explanation but to bring the soldiers recorded on film to life “as human beings.”
First, Reconstructing “Time”
Before adding color and sound, the greatest difficulty was reconstructing the “time” embedded in the film. Cameras of the period were hand-cranked, so filming speeds were unstable, often around 13–16 frames per second and frequently changing even within one reel.
Showing this footage directly at today’s standard 24 frames per second makes movement unnaturally fast and hectic, like an old comedy. This “comic speed” was the greatest barrier preventing viewers from empathizing with the soldiers.
The restoration team used advanced interpolation, algorithmically generating and inserting missing frames. Simply slowing playback would make it drag, so they analyzed movement between existing frames and digitally created entirely new intermediate images.
Where footage had large gaps, VFX artists referred to objects moving across the image and effectively rebuilt motion by hand as if animating it. Painstaking speed correction returned walking and cigarette-smoking gestures to the same flow of real time that we inhabit. Jackson later described this work as the most important foundation for successful colorization.
Color Based on Research, Not Appearance
The standard differed fundamentally from the imaginative, arbitrary coloring used when Ted Turner colorized classic black-and-white films for television in the 1980s.
Jackson is also one of the world’s leading private collectors of World War I uniforms and weapons, and his collection became the most important color reference. To determine the real color represented by a shade of gray, the team brought authentic uniforms, helmets, equipment, and even artillery parts into the studio and filmed and analyzed them under varied lighting.
British uniforms were not simply green or brown but a distinctive brownish tone. The team painstakingly derived from real items how that color changed when covered in mud, wet with rain, or dry.
Environmental color received equal rigor. When a filming location could be identified, the colors of local soil and grass and even the sky reflected in puddles were researched, while Jackson photographed landscapes in France and Belgium as color references.
StereoD, a VFX company specializing in Hollywood 3D conversion, provided technical support. It adapted techniques for separating flat monochrome images into elements and even developed a dedicated “palette tool.”
Accurately isolating people, clothing, mud, and sky digitally and applying research-based colors restored dimensionality and texture. Irregularly moving subjects such as splashing water, flying earth, and artillery smoke were especially difficult to color, but exhaustive attention to detail overcame the problems.
Giving “Voices” to Silent Footage
Jackson says, “It was not a silent war; it was a war of sound.” The footage was silent only because of technical limitations. The real battlefield contained voices and thunderous noise. Soldiers in the images move their mouths and chat, and officers shout toward units, yet none of the sound survives.
To discover what they said, the production hired a forensic lip-reading specialist. Much of the recovered speech was not dramatic dialogue but ordinary remarks, such as smiling at the camera and saying, “Hello, Mum, I’m all right.”
The filmmakers rejected the temptation to invent dialogue and insisted on identifying the words actually spoken. This “ordinary everyday conversation” vividly reveals the humanity of young men buried in history’s shadow.
The pursuit went further. Because British units were often organized around specific towns or regions, the team identified soldiers’ origins from uniforms and insignia, then cast actors with precisely the same local accents to dub them.
The accuracy of the reading was reportedly confirmed when actors’ voices aligned exactly with the soldiers’ lip movements after applying regional pronunciation. One speech was difficult to lip-read, so Jackson researched regimental records and found the text of the encouragement read on the occasion. A test recording reportedly matched the mouth movements beautifully.
Constructing the Sounds of Battle
The environmental sound enveloping the battlefield was also built from scratch. Boots in mud, rifle bolts, and exploding mortars were carefully recreated under sound-effects supervisor Brent Burge.
Jackson’s collection again proved useful: loading and firing were recorded with period firearms and cartridge cases he owned. Artillery in particular did not rely on stock libraries; with the New Zealand Army’s cooperation, real guns were fired and recorded outdoors.
Recorders placed at both the firing and impact sides captured the report and strike three-dimensionally. Theater mixing sent the sound pressure directly into viewers’ chests, making the physical terror of battle approach through hearing.
Only Veterans’ Own Voices Tell the Story
The film contains neither an outside narrator explaining history from above nor a modern historian. Most of the soundtrack consists of testimony from British veterans who survived the war, recorded by the BBC and IWM in the 1960s and 1970s.
From about 600 hours of recordings by roughly 200 people, testimony from more than 100 was selected and arranged chronologically from enlistment through the war’s end and homecoming, like one soldier’s story. They recount vivid daily life: youthful anxiety to enlist before the war ended, tedious training, terrible food at the front, and brewing tea with a tank’s heat.
The overlapping accounts reveal a multifaceted truth in which men still joked under extreme conditions and formed strange friendships and solidarity.
The film also refuses to look away from death. Its conclusion portrays not the joy of the armistice but the cold reality awaiting returning soldiers. Far from being welcomed as heroes, they encountered incomprehension from a society that had not known the war.
One soldier said that on his first day back at his prewar shop, a coworker asked, “Haven’t seen you for a while—where have you been?” The home front’s overwhelming indifference to young men who fought and died in unimaginable places created the divide that kept them silent for so long—and the “voice” this film sought to rescue.
The Transition from Monochrome to Color
The film’s most shocking moment is the sudden transformation of its image. The opening, from enlistment and training through the crossing to France, deliberately retains rough quality, monochrome, silence, and an almost square frame.
The instant the unit steps into the front-line trenches, however, black borders vanish, the frame widens, movement becomes smooth, and green, muddy brown, and blood red flood the screen. At the same time birds, marching boots, and officers’ shouts rush in explosively. Like *The Wizard of Oz*, the world acquires color.
This transition is more than a technical showcase. People unconsciously process monochrome footage as a “historical relic” and watch from a distance. The moment it moves smoothly in full color and speaks in regionally specific accents, the figures on screen change in perception from a “record” into “people alive there now.”
Viewers feel the weight of trench mud, the fear of possible death at any moment, and the preciousness of young people laughing under death’s shadow as though standing there themselves.
What the Film Asked Us to Consider
Such extensive alteration provoked debate over the treatment of historical footage. Critics asked whether changing records originally shot silent and monochrome constituted falsification. Others noted that lip-reading might infer words but could not perfectly restore century-old pronunciation and exact accents.
Concerns also arose that fusing the very different conditions of 1914, 1916, and 1918 into one “universal experience” made rigorous verification of particular units and battles difficult, and that testimony recorded roughly fifty years after the war could include transformed memories.
Jackson answered clearly: if period camera operators had possessed color, sound, and stereoscopic technology, they would undoubtedly have used it.
Remembering history in black and white is merely a product of technical constraint. The soldiers saw war in full color and heard deafening noise. Removing technical artifacts and scientifically restoring the color and sound that should have been there was, in his view, the greatest respect that could be paid to them.
IWM and “14-18 NOW” also prepared the film as an educational resource for modern classrooms considering war and reconciliation. Treating archives sleeping in underground storage as “living testimony” rather than mere records, the film powerfully demonstrated that technology can become a lens not for falsifying the past but for restoring the humanity of unnamed people and passing their stories to the next generation.