“Colorization of older footage is amazing and it can be such a vehicle for education.”

And he created a documentary that brought World War 1 to life in a manner that the world has never seen. And it’s so wild how it can take something that we would look over so quickly, especially if you’re not a war enthusiast yourself. You would see this footage, the frame rate is super fast because someone was probably literally winding the camera. So it looks like people are walking in fast motion, silently with this damaged film. It’s very easy to be like, “Okay, so I get it. World War 1 was literally — feels like hundreds of years ago, based on that footage,” which makes no sense because video didn’t exist a hundred years ago, but whatever. But when you put in the effort that Jackson did and his team, suddenly you have something incredibly compelling and it feels closer to time travel than it does to just finding a relic of film. And at least once a year, I will show my students the trailer for They Shall Not Grow Old, which begins in black and white with the original footage and slowly works its way into the colorization and it never fails to make my kids’ jaws drop. And suddenly, you can see them just, almost like a light switch, they go from not even knowing what World War 1 was to suddenly completely engaged and they want more. It’s so — when done correctly, colorization of older footage is amazing and it can be such a vehicle for education.