Rare unseen historic documentary footage filmed in 1919 Ypres in Flanders Belgium, after the First World War. Now HD colorized with sound. Brought to Life in 4K 120fps with added sound. The aftermath of four years of World War One like you’ve never seen before.
In Flanders Fields
“In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie.”
Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. 1915
This remarkable HD colorized historical documentary film taken in 1919 features pilot Jacques Marie Charles Trolley de Prévaux (1888-1944) who twenty years later would be fighting in the French Resistance. He and his wife Lotka Leitner were both executed by the Gestapo in 1944 just as the Allies were liberating Paris.
Filmmaker Lucien Le Saint can also be briefly seen in this extended film shot over Flanders fields and the ruins of Ypres in Belgium. We also see footage from the Western Front in France. The ruins of the cities of Reims, Mont-Saint-Éloi, Bailleul and Mont Saint Michel ( which was occupied by Germany).
The Film
Following the Armistice, in early 1919, Trolley de Prévaux and Le Saint undertook a pivotal flight over the devastated Western Front, from the Belgian coastline to the French citadel city of Verdun. They meticulously recorded the war-torn landscape for posterity. This footage, a testament to the horrific destruction of the First World War and it serves as a grim warning of where the world is possibly heading today. This footage would remain unseen by the public for nearly a century until a 2010 BBC documentary presented by Fergal Keane called The First World War From Above introduced is to the Resistance hero Trolley de Prévaux. His daughter Aude Yung-de Prévaux who was a baby when her parents were taken by the Gestapo, had never seen her fathers image until this film was shown to her.
How silent footage is HD colorized and brought to Life
I take early fragments of silent 16fps footage and restore them to life by a combination of manual frame by frame colorization as well as the use of deep exemplar-based video colorization techniques. The footage is upscaled and the frames interpolated to a higher frame rate ( in most cases 60 frames per second.) Finally I produce a soundtrack which helps build a new immersive experience for the viewer.
Together, these processes revive old fragments of footage, offering audiences a more
vivid and engaging glimpse of lives long since lived in the distant past.
The colorization process used Deep exemplar-based Video colorization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.09909
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Original Footage:
Original BW silent footage by Licien le Saint
Albert Kahn Musee
License: (CC-00) – Public Domain
https://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/
