The Virtual History team faced an immense challenge when they decided to produce footage that looked like archive film. When considering how filming should proceed, the director and his team imagined they had discovered four reels of film that had been shot on 20th July 1944. They aimed to recreate the events of that day in exactly as their imagination led them to believe, as if the four war leaders had each been followed around by a cameraman that very day.
To accomplish this, the team analysed the look of genuine archive footage, paying careful attention to the way it was shot, lit and to the behaviour of the people it featured.
�In reality it�s likely that these great moments in history were really rather mundane. The people involved were simply doing their jobs and were not aware of being
filmed or thinking about how they would be portrayed years later� explains Virtual History�s Director, David McNab. �The trick to filming the scenes was a perfect example of the phrase �less is more�. The less the actors did, the more realistic the fake archive looked; if there was too much movement or emphasis it began to look more like drama and less convincing as archive footage.�
Film shot by a cameraman following Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin in 1944 would have looked very basic with no special lighting or filming techniques. In order to reproduce this style, the director of
photography had to keep filming very simple. The result is that sometimes the film looks under-exposed and very dark and at other times it appears over-exposed, just as it would have done if it had been shot in 1944.
Each scene had to be shot three times; the first time without the actors so the editors had a clean shot of the background set, the second time with the actors and the third time with the main characters wearing special frames around their faces. These frames were especially designed as a guide for the computer animated masks, so that when they were laid over the top they would fit perfectly and follow each movement of the head seamlessly.
Once filming on the set was complete, the CGI was added. In closer shots, the actors� faces were replaced with the electronic masks. These were computer animated to authentically imitate the leaders� faces while speaking.
Film shot in 1944 does not have a modern, uniform appearance. This mean that once the animated CGI masks had been integrated into the live action footage, the film had to be coloured and graded to look like archive film. Editors digitally altered the grade and focus of each shot, scene by scene. The colours were changed to match original archive and finally the appearance of film damage was added to create footage that looked sixty years old.
All through the production process Director David McNab had to imagine how all the elements would eventually fit together. When directing the actors on set he had to pay close attention to every detail to ensure it would appear authentic. When filming the motion capture for the electronic masks he had to consider the live action that had already been shot and make sure the facial expressions matched the movements of the main characters.
When dialogue was recorded, each voice had to sound just as Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt would have spoken. They were then digitally altered to sound as if they were recorded with the technology available in 1944. The extensive research and attention to detail has resulted in new archive footage which looks and sounds just like the genuine article.
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