Watch: Peter Jackson brings colour to WW1

Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson has used all the firepower of his Lord of the Rings post production house and the Hollywood 3D facility behind Black Panther and Ready Player One to turn black and white film from the First World War into colour in such a startling way that it brings soldiers’ “faces to life”.

The monumental project, using archive from the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in the UK, is one of the largest and longest restorations ever undertaken due mainly to the amount of scanned footage and the post production processes employed to deliver the final look and sound for the film.

The King Kong and Lord of the Rings trilogy director has also sharpened some of the footage and slowed down the jitters that accompanied early, hand-cranked cameras.

A WW1 buff whose British grandfather fought at Gallipoli and whose hobby is the modelling of highly detailed large-scale World War One aircraft, was approached by the IWM four years ago to see if he could create something original about the life of a soldier on the Western front.

Jackson apparently spent several weeks at the museum watching original WW1 archive and mad…