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7 | The IFP -H alton H ills | T hursday,January 10,2019 theifp.ca Furnace Air Conditioning Gaslines Boilers Water Heaters Radiant Heating 905-877-3100 proud local dealer of Canadian made products .ca • Truck Accessories • Upholstery • Heavy Equipment Glass •Window Tinting 354 Guelph Street, Georgetown 905-873-1655 Wehandleall insurance work. We handle all insurance work. To book this space call 905-873-0301 To book this space YOUR AD HERE! For Christmas, my grandchildren, Oliver and Atlee, gave The Sidekick and I tickets to attend a screening of Peter Jack- son's First World War docu- mentary, They Shall Not Grow Old. The tickets were pre- sold with only two screen- ing dates in Canada - Dec. 17 and 27. I'd read how Peter Jack- son had taken 100-year-old film footage and through the use of cutting edge technology, created an in- credibly realistic docu- mentary of The Great War, from 1914 to 1918. I was ex- cited to see it. Jackson is best known as the director, writer and producer of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hob- bit trilogy, adapted from the novels by J.R.R. Tol- kien. And he used similar cut- ting-edge technology em- ployed in the Tolkien se- ries' to produce this film. It is simply beyond words. The film opens with Jackson introducing the project, inviting theatrego- ers to stay behind after the credits run, as he had an- other short film explaining the technical tools used to create it. The film opens days be- fore the outbreak of The Great War, and the narra- tion in the background is taken from actual veterans of the Great War, who had been interviewed in the 1960s through a project at the BBC. The film walks us through the declaration of war, the crowds of men lin- ing up to enlist, and vari- ous scenes of basic training and the gruelling daily marches through the coun- tryside. One could see the trans- formation as thousands of young, undisciplined re- cruits evolved into a fight- ing machine. They were young, cocky and eager to fight. But as the film ad- vanced, the mood started to change. The strain of the battles showed and the fac- es became longer and more haggard, as the bodies piled up in the craters in No Man's Land. The film footage of the artillery was amazing, with shells and shrapnel flying through the air. I was certain this couldn't be actual footage - it was simply too "good" from a technical, photo- graphic point of view. It was colourized - noth- ing new these days - but the jerky, shaky film images were gone. It rivalled mod- ern war coverage of today. We remained behind for Sir Peter Jackson's descrip- tion of the production and the technology employed. He told how the crew re- viewed over 600 hours of in- terviews with over 200 sol- diers and viewed countless hours of original film foot- age. After selecting the actu- al footage they'd use, the technology was brought in- to play. Jackson utilized soft- ware that converts the speed of the film from the original 14 to 15 frames per second to the present-day standard of 24. The soft- ware reads the frame, then creates the missing frames in between, optimizing it to run smoothly like present film. They also colourized it a frame at a time to get the colours right. Even the occasional red poppy growing in the grass was colourized. In his quest for perfec- tion, Jackson spent a great deal of time in Europe, pho- tographing various battle- fields where the campaigns had been fought. Some lo- cations had hardly changed at all. It was at one location where Jackson's narration hit me with full impact. Flipping between the colourized footage of the First World War soldiers waiting for the order to go over the top, to present day at the same location, Jack- son made an incredibly poignant comment. "What you're seeing here is the last 30 minutes of these men's lives. They were wiped out when they attacked that day ..." My grandfather was a veteran of the Great War. We never talked about the war - I was only eight years old when he died. But after watching Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old, I can honestly say I have an overwhelm- ingly greater appreciation for what he did and en- dured - as well as his com- rades whose bodies remain buried in the battlefields of Europe. If you ever have an op- portunity to see this film - grab it. It is that good. Ted Brown is a free- lance journalist working for the IFP. You can con- tact him at tedbit@hot- mail.com 'THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD'- PETER JACKSON'S MASTERPIECE OPINION FIRST WORLD WAR FOOTAGE BROUGHT TO LIFE, WRITES TED BROWN TED BROWN Column The Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet that once was located at Guelph Street and Maple Avenue in Georgetown is now the site of Meldrum Orthodontics. The photo of KFC was taken in 1979. John Sommer/photo THEN AND NOW Alison Walker/photo