ShareThisFor viewers uninterested in "UFO Hunters," "Gangland" and "Pawn Stars," TV watchers who long for the days when History was known as "the Hitler Channel," your time has come again.
The network, formerly known as History Channel (they've now dropped "Channel" from the network name), returns to its roots with "World War II in HD," a five-night, 10-hour series (9 p.m. EST Sunday-Thursday) that chronicles WWII with little-seen, almost exclusively color footage that tracks the battles through the stories of 12 people who were there.
So how do you make a WWII program in HD when the technology to film in HD didn't exist until decades after the war?
"The old footage has a lot of clarity to begin with," said Michael Stiller, an executive producer for History. "Most of this footage was 16mm shot in color during the war. We scanned it in frame by frame and converted it to HD, and it gives you an image quality that is basically like the original, whereas if you just transferred it to video you'd get a much degraded image."
Gary Sinese ("Forrest Gump," "CSI: NY") narrates the program, which follows a dozen Americans who served. For the living veterans, History made an unusual choice: Their voices segue into the voices of actors who relate their wartime experiences.
"One of the goals of 'World War II in HD' was to put people in the moment of the war," Stiller said. "We felt the combination of showing the veterans and hearing their memories, which is very powerful, but also combining that with actors who play their younger voices transported you into that moment. The actors are channeling the younger versions of (the veterans)."
Dialogue for the voice actors was culled from diaries, journals and sometimes books written by the vets. In addition, new interviews were conducted with living veterans that also helped generate some of that dialogue.
"What we never do is invent events or anything like that," Stiller said.
Some video footage used is "representational," meaning that "every once in a while you're talking about a naval battle and it might include one shot of a destroyer sailing along that didn't take place in that battle," Stiller said, noting that historians looked at footage and advised when an image did not fit. "It's hyper-accurate. Let's say we're telling the story of a battle in 1943. We have a team of historians look at it and they might say, 'You can't use this shot because he's carrying a rifle that was not introduced until 1944.' "
"World War II in HD" was two years in the making, and Stiller said much of the footage hasn't been seen publicly in decades, if ever.
"A lot of stuff was shot in color during the war, but black-and-white prints were made of the color material. In some cases, the color material was lost. In other cases, it was in safe keeping but wasn't readily available," Stiller said. "We hired producers who knew where to look and they looked very hard, going into basements, blowing dust off boxes, looking in smaller museums and finding cans of film that hadn't been opened since the 1950s."
In addition to transferring the film to HD, Stiller said History has worked to preserve the footage, returning digital copies of logged footage to its owners.
Although the history of World War II has been told many times before, including in PBS's Ken Burns 2007 documentary "The War," Stiller said "World War II in HD" takes a different approach.
"I liken it more to 'Band of Brothers,' " he said, referring to the 2001 HBO miniseries set in WWII. "This is very emotional, very immersive. It very much transports you into the war through lost footage. It began for us with the notion that there's a lot more color footage out there than we've ever seen before. As we were (finding that footage), we decided that the type of film we wanted to do would have to be very experiential and that's how we got to the veterans telling their stories."
(E-mail Rob Owen at rowen(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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