Exploring WWII in HD with Director Frederic Lumiere by Reg Seeton
Award winning filmmaker Frederic Lumiere has not only produced, directed and edited a number of high profile projects for A&E, History, Cinemax, and The Biography Channel but Lumiere was also a driving architectural force behind the creation of the revolutionary RED Digital camera, which has been used by such elite directors as Steven Soderbergh and Peter Jackson. A leader in both HD technology and documentary filmmaking, Frederic Lumiere embarked on his most ambitious and rewarding project to date with the 10 hour, five night docu-showcase, WWII in HD, airing on History as of Sunday, November 15, which tells the stories of 12 World War II veterans through an astonishing array of 3000 hours of never-before-seen WWII footage culled from personal collections and archives from around the world.
Also told by select real life veterans and the voice work of actors Justin Bartha, Rob Corddry, Tim Dekay, Mark Hefti, James Kyson Lee, Ron Livingston, LL Cool J, Rob Lowe, Josh Lucas, Jason Ritter, Steve Zahan, and Amy Smart, WWII in HD is a one of a kind, landmark event that brings the WWII to life in a modern era like you've never seen it before. Now in its run on History as of November 15, narrated by actor Gary Sinese, the new five night, 10 hour History documentary event, WWII in HD, gives viewers a riveting, never before seen showcase of World War II though the lives of nine soldiers, two reporters and one nurse from cleaned and digitally restored footage. WWII in HD allows TV history fans to experience the war in full HD color as the soldiers did themselves.
To celebrate the landmark television event, we caught up with WWII in HD producer and director Frederic Lumiere to learn more about the extensive process of bringing WWII to life in HD, the technology behind the restoration, the countless hours of unseen WWII footage, how he was able to work the footage into a working narrative, and why WWII in HD is so important to this generation and beyond.
THE DEADBOLT: So did it feel like you were leading an army at times?
FREDERIC LUMIERE: [laughs] Yeah. I mean, we had a lot of people. We used to joke that every time we'd get a new contact list each week of everybody on the team - I think it got to fifty people at some point. It was a lot of people and it did feel like an army. We liked to fantasize we were going through battles the same way some of the stories we're telling, and often we'd actually take some lessons from the stories and get inspired by the stories. There were a lot of analogies going around. When things weren't going so well we'd draw some analogies from the stories we were telling.
It varied, because there's really three stages to this project. The first stage was to acquire all of the footage. That took, my gosh, almost a year. That was a completely different team and it was a lot of people. There was a guy named Todd Himmelreich who was the chief archivist at the time. You know, the project was so long that we had people change jobs from the company. I've had a newborn who is almost two years, she was born during the project. So it's very strange and I can't remember anything before it.
So that was the first stage, which was acquiring the footage. We had tons of interns just looking at every piece of footage and logging it, and that took awhile. We also had to develop a database. Greg Miller, the chief archivist, helped with that. For it to work well, the database had to show you the footage as you catch a query. So you could type "raid Tarawa" with "hand grenade" and you'd have six queries coming back. For it to work well, you'd have to actually see the footage. So we actually digitized all of that footage in two different versions, one for editing and one for the database. So you'd click on it and it would show you a time code and it would show you the log and you'd be able to look at it right there and then. That was hugely beneficial to the process.
The next two stages were the writing and editorial.
THE DEADBOLT: So what were the main challenges in restoring the footage? You must have encountered a slew of challenges.
LUMIERE: Well, the first challenge was that it was a lot [of footage] and it came in different qualities. Some of it came in pristine quality and some of it came in where Tom Schinstine, our engineer, had to fix the reel before we could even put it in the projector or the scanner. Some film was just unusable, because we had a call out there and we took any film from the Forties from anybody, and some of it was really not usable. But for the most part, we used the RED camera for everything in house. Much to people's surprise, the storage was actually not a big challenge. A lot of people would think that because the RED camera shoots in 4K, you're going to acquire that thousands of hours and it's going to take a lot of space. What we did was just convert it to digital because it's 4K and then we could store many, many films on LTO tapes.
On each LTO tape, which are about 300 gigabytes each, we can store 2 hours of 4K RED footage. In the process of doing that, we also converted to a small DV clip and a little H.264 clip, one for the database and one for the editors. So the editors really edited the whole show in DV and that was really the only way. We had a huge storage area network. I think it was 24 terabytes, but it was all DV footage. If we wanted to do it in HD, first of all we would've needed a lot more storage space.
We actually had a guy at the National Archives. What he did is that he shot with a little DV camera every piece of footage in color from the National Archives from the war. He shot it against the wall just with this little camera and he would send us these DV tapes. Then what we did is we used these tapes to edit the show and then reference back to the original film and then place an order with the National Archives for the original reels so we could scan them in HD. When that footage would come in we'd be floored by the quality once it had gone through the C-Reality scanners.
THE DEADBOLT: What were some of the challenges in boiling each story down into a cohesive narrative while filling in gaps with footage from all angles?
LUMIERE: That is such a good question. And that is a question from someone who really understands the process, because obviously, as you can deduce, we couldn't make up footage, we only had the footage that we had. So the first thing we did was at the end of that long process for stage one of the project, we had a report. The report would tell us, "Okay, we have fifteen hours of North Africa. Out of those fifteen hours, ten hours are in 'A' condition, two hours are in 'B' condition, and three hours are in 'C' condition. 'C' condition is virtually unusable, something you don't want to use. Once you have this great report for every theater of operation and where your footage resides, then when you have set the stories you can put that in perspective. It's kind of like the old memory game, you know?
Now you try to match the characters in your story to the footage. So let's say we find Jack Werner. Jack Werner is an Austrian Jew who came from Austria in 1939 to the Unites States, joined the army, to fight Hitler, but ended up going to Attu. Okay, Attu. Number one, do we have any footage on Attu? Yes, we have nine solid hours of Attu. Then he went to Kwajaleine and then he went to the Leyte Gulf. So what you do is: Once you have all of your potential characters, you try to match their story to your footage buckets, we go from hundreds and hundreds of diaries, and then we pair it down to just a few dozen. Then we really assess it based on the quality of the stories and how intertwinable they are, so to speak. That process alone took months, months of reading and months of evaluating. You know, "Is this a character that we can tell a good visual story for?" So that was part of it.
Then the other part with a team like that, one of the things we would do, we would say, "Whenever you see something that is so incredible, you have to tag it," and incorporate it into the story. For instance, the execution of the Serbs in Yugoslavia. That's something we absolutely have to tell. So how do we do that in a seamless way without forcing it? There's a whole bunch of those. There's the suicide of the Japanese civilians in Saipan, which you will see in episode five. We HAVE to work that in. So it's a lot of back and forth, a lot of keeping all of the balls in the air, and a lot of multi-tasking. It's really an organic process to be able to pull that off.
We had some great characters that we didn't use. The reason we didn't use them is because they may have a great story in North Africa, but the other thing is it's not just about a character being able to tell us a great story in one theater of operations. We also wanted it to feel like a scripted drama television series. What we wanted really to do is follow the characters throughout those ten episodes. So if Charles Scheffel only had one good North Africa story, then he was unusable for us because we don't want to just drop him off unless he gets killed like Archie Sweeney. But we really want to follow Scheffel throughout the whole war, a little bit like Band of Brothers.
THE DEADBOLT: I wanted to ask about the additional footage. Do you have more so that you can cover from different angles for other series?
LUMIERE: Oh yeah, we have tons and tons of footage. Lou Reda should be able to draft at least three or four more seasons out of that series. Just the air war alone, oh my gosh, some of the stuff I just watch it. Lots of dog fights from the cockpit but also fighter planes mowing down Japanese running on the beach and hitting some. You have missiles going through factories and coming out on the other end, the footage is endless. So yes, there's at least three more seasons out of that pool without reusing too much footage.
THE DEADBOLT: Can you talk about working with the actors to embody the veterans in an accurate manner and how they got into the real characters?
LUMIERE: Well, I'll use some examples. Justin Bartha as Jack Werner is our first character and he has a pretty strong Austrian accent. Justin actually took some voice coaching in New York to learn the Austrian accent. One of the big challenges we had, was the tone, because you could do this in so many ways and you could really fall flat on your face. The best way to describe it to the actors, is your talking to one person. It's not an audience, it's one person in the present.
We would play the scene of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas for the actors before the session. You know, the scene where he walks through the diner. It's a little bit reflective, but it's in the present.
Ron Livingston really wanted to sound and feel like Charlie Scheffel. He's from Oklahoma and he has that accent. So every half hour or so, we would replay a clip of Charlie Scheffel for Ron. Amy Smart is also very natural. You'll see, she does some scenes where she brings you to tears and she's actually crying while she's telling those stories. When June Wandrey sees the kids die in North Africa, she brought everybody to tears, it was amazing.
THE DEADBOLT: In the past when footage has been cleaned up and restored, I've heard some people say it almost looks "too real". How did you get around that? Did you know that some people would perceive that, or did you even think about it?
LUMIERE: By "too real", do you mean it's too digital, too much like HD? Or the content of the footage is so amazing it almost looks staged?
THE DEADBOLT: Exactly. That's what I was getting at in that it looks almost unreal.
LUMIERE: It's a really good point. A friend of mine’s son plays a lot of video games, he's only 13. When he found out I was working on this project, he said the only channel he watches is History. And then he plays all of his video games and many of the games he plays are from the World War II era. He asked me if I had anything for him to do. I said, "Yeah, absolutely.” So I gave him four or five hours of footage from the Pacific and said, "Okay, all you have to do is play the footage and enter keywords into the database. Just type words of what you see, just logging footage, which is what all of our interns were doing.
In the morning he called and said, "Mr. Frederic, this is unbelievable." I'm said, "What's wrong?" He says, "This is so much more real than the video games, and it's real. It's amazing." It just kind of made me realize these kids are playing video games and they're blowing each other up and they don't realize that this is based on real people and real stories. It’s a shame that the video games don’t have the Marine who gives water to this 3 year old little girl who is shaking because she is so afraid, covered in mud. The funerals, the real drama, the real tragedies.
When you put that with the incredible visuals and explosions and battles, I think people will really get to appreciate it. I think that's when people get to realize this is not just entertainment, these are real lives. I think what we're able to do with HD in color now is to make people realize that every one of these soldiers, every Marine and navy guy and woman that went out there that you used to see in black and white with cheesy music, when you hear the sounds, the way we designed it and you see those faces, every one of those persons has a story, has a family, a mother, a brother just like you and me. When you really get that, then all of a sudden it takes on a whole new dimension, World War II is well alive again and the true amazing sacrifices they made.
THE DEADBOLT: What struck me was how unprepared a lot of the soldiers and the country was at the time. Did the footage make it more powerful in terms of how things came together, like everyone pulled together in relation to what's going on today?
LUMIERE: Having been with these stories for so long now and having talked to the vets, these guys always say the same thing, "When we got in this thing, we had no f**king idea. We didn't know what we were doing. We joined because it was exciting. It was a way to travel the world. Everybody else was doing it and we were patriots. We hated the Japanese, we wanted to go kick their ass. We wanted to take it to Hitler. But had we known what we were about to do, there's a good chance most of us would've never done it." When Jack Werner opens the whole show, he says it perfectly when he talks about the Greatest Generation. This young guy next to him in the foxhole who got shot in the head, and he didn't get to do anything. It was like day one and he died. And Jack says in his wonderful European matter of fact, philosophical way, "Now, was he part of the greatest generation? Was he great? No, there was nothing great about him. But was he part of the greatest generation? Absolutely."
So what this makes me realize is that the current generation, yeah they're spoiled and complacent and probably uninspired, but it's not very much unlike the kids of the 1940's. There was probably a little more discipline because of the culture but what made them great was their destiny with greatness. They were called on to be great. They didn't start out great, they were faced with decisions to make and became great. I think you'll see it better than ever when Robert Sherrod, the reporter from Time magazine, goes to Tarawa and he's on the ship with a bunch of Marines and they look like a bunch of jokers.
I mean, he's looking at these guys thinking, "My God, what can these guys do against the Japanese?" Sherrod just came from Attu and Kiska and he just saw the results of a Banzai attack. He realized that he Japanese are willing to sacrifice their life and they will fight to the death. He's comparing them with these 18 and 19 year olds on the deck of the ship playing around, and he's like, "Okay, we may have the machines of war," because by then we ramped up an amazing capabilities with ships and so forth and we're about to unleash hell on Tarawa. But he said, "Thank God we have these machines of war because these guys are not capable. I don't believe they can win a war and I don't believe they are a match for the kind of ferocity that the Japanese fighter has."
So we bomb the heck out of Tarawa. Sherrod thinks, "Holy crap, awesome! There's no way anybody can survive this kind of bombing, no way, the island is on fire." So they all go very hopeful to land on that shore and basically take that island and there was a miscalculation with the tide and all of the amphibious boats are stuck at the reef. So now these guys had to jump off of their boat and they're stuck in the water neck deep and they wade through the water and they're getting slaughtered, one after the next. They realized the Japanese had very little losses because they built these bunkers for nine months and the shelling of the island didn't do anything. So now it's up to just those kids to pull it off and the machines are useless. It's just these guys.
So when you see what these guys did - I'm a strong believer that these 18, 19, 20 year olds became men on that beach in a matter of a few hours. I'd like to believe, because I'm very patriotic, that if it was us and it was our generation, because of the American spirit and the spirit of survival, that I think they would do the same thing. I think destiny calls you to be great.
Technology has its good points and bad but this is where you get real value in seeing things in a new light. My grandfather was in the war and I'm glad people aren't letting the new genration forget how much they sacrificed and how they were true heroes. Nice to know there's more to come with so much footage.
Award winning filmmaker Frederic Lumiere has not only produced, directed and edited a number of high profile projects for A&E, History, Cinemax, and The Biography Channel but Lumiere was also a driving architectural force behind the creation of the revolutionary RED Digital camera, which has been used by such elite directors as Steven Soderbergh and Peter Jackson. A leader in both HD technology and documentary filmmaking, 
It varied, because there's really three stages to this project. The first stage was to acquire all of the footage. That took, my gosh, almost a year. That was a completely different team and it was a lot of people. There was a guy named Todd Himmelreich who was the chief archivist at the time. You know, the project was so long that we had people change jobs from the company. I've had a newborn who is almost two years, she was born during the project. So it's very strange and I can't remember anything before it.
On each LTO tape, which are about 300 gigabytes each, we can store 2 hours of 4K RED footage. In the process of doing that, we also converted to a small DV clip and a little H.264 clip, one for the database and one for the editors. So the editors really edited the whole show in DV and that was really the only way. We had a huge storage area network. I think it was 24 terabytes, but it was all DV footage. If we wanted to do it in HD, first of all we would've needed a lot more storage space.
Now you try to match the characters in your story to the footage. So let's say we find Jack Werner. Jack Werner is an Austrian Jew who came from Austria in 1939 to the Unites States, joined the army, to fight Hitler, but ended up going to Attu. Okay, Attu. Number one, do we have any footage on Attu? Yes, we have nine solid hours of Attu. Then he went to Kwajaleine and then he went to the Leyte Gulf. So what you do is: Once you have all of your potential characters, you try to match their story to your footage buckets, we go from hundreds and hundreds of diaries, and then we pair it down to just a few dozen. Then we really assess it based on the quality of the stories and how intertwinable they are, so to speak. That process alone took months, months of reading and months of evaluating. You know, "Is this a character that we can tell a good visual story for?" So that was part of it.
LUMIERE: Oh yeah, we have tons and tons of footage. Lou Reda should be able to draft at least three or four more seasons out of that series. Just the air war alone, oh my gosh, some of the stuff I just watch it. Lots of dog fights from the cockpit but also fighter planes mowing down Japanese running on the beach and hitting some. You have missiles going through factories and coming out on the other end, the footage is endless. So yes, there's at least three more seasons out of that pool without reusing too much footage.
LUMIERE: By "too real", do you mean it's too digital, too much like HD? Or the content of the footage is so amazing it almost looks staged?
LUMIERE: Having been with these stories for so long now and having talked to the vets, these guys always say the same thing, "When we got in this thing, we had no f**king idea. We didn't know what we were doing. We joined because it was exciting. It was a way to travel the world. Everybody else was doing it and we were patriots. We hated the Japanese, we wanted to go kick their ass. We wanted to take it to Hitler. But had we known what we were about to do, there's a good chance most of us would've never done it." When Jack Werner opens the whole show, he says it perfectly when he talks about the Greatest Generation. This young guy next to him in the foxhole who got shot in the head, and he didn't get to do anything. It was like day one and he died. And Jack says in his wonderful European matter of fact, philosophical way, "Now, was he part of the greatest generation? Was he great? No, there was nothing great about him. But was he part of the greatest generation? Absolutely."
So we bomb the heck out of Tarawa. Sherrod thinks, "Holy crap, awesome! There's no way anybody can survive this kind of bombing, no way, the island is on fire." So they all go very hopeful to land on that shore and basically take that island and there was a miscalculation with the tide and all of the amphibious boats are stuck at the reef. So now these guys had to jump off of their boat and they're stuck in the water neck deep and they wade through the water and they're getting slaughtered, one after the next. They realized the Japanese had very little losses because they built these bunkers for nine months and the shelling of the island didn't do anything. So now it's up to just those kids to pull it off and the machines are useless. It's just these guys.