When HN users recommended it
1 HN user recommended this in 2023, in one comment.
20072026
Each tall tick is one HN user's first recommendation. A short tick is the same user again. Click a tick to jump to the comment.
They Shall Not Grow Old
Amazon's catalog no longer lists this product (checked 2026-11-02). The name comes from the link HN users posted.
Related: Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old [0] is a great counterpoint to the general idea put forth here.
If you've not seen it, do yourself and ANZAC Day treat and watch it this evening. It's from just before all this AI stuff went off.
Jackson (of LoTR fame) is a huge WWI buff and was approached by the Imperial War Museum and the BBC for this film. He takes old archival footage and then uses a lot of computer massaging and hard work to 'update' the old footage. It really gives a good feeling of the life of a Brittish solider in the first war.
He puts the camera speed at modern fps, he colorizes the black and white, he puts sound in, de-jitters it, etc.
I managed to see it in theaters, and the moment when it goes from black and white to color is just amazing. The whole audience just gasped. Really. These boys jumping around, walking like penguins, grainy and burned, silent, on the old archives, they become people, real people again.
I'm not watching a 'historical' thingy in school anymore, I'm watching a real boy march along in the toxic sludge of Passchendaele, staring at this new fangled camera thing.
That feeling, that moment, anchored to the horrible reality of the footage, but made better and somehow more real, that is what AI can give us on a mass scale for all this old evidence.
Jackson's hard work paved the way to treat this new genre of lovingly updated historical footage. AI will take it all the way.
Really, this ANZAC Day, go watch it [1]. You will not regret it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Shall_Not_Grow_Old
[1] https://www.amazon.com/They-Shall-Not-Grow-Old/dp/B07PMNNGVH