WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) – Taking a break from filmmaking, Peter Jackson has created a museum exhibition he hopes will broaden people’s perception of World War I from monochrome to color.
The first stage of the Great War Exhibition he unveiled Friday in Wellington features large color images depicting life in the trenches and on the battlefields. The color was added to real black-and-white photographs by artists at Jackson’s visual-effects studio, Weta Digital.
Jackson said he banned black and-white in the museum because the photography of the era means people tend to perceive the war in monochrome.
“I just wanted people to be able to see the war in color, as the soldiers saw it,” Jackson said. “If you take a black-and-white photo and do a really great colorizing job on it, you see detail. You see it’s emotional. It actually has a power that really takes you by surprise.”
A World War I history buff, Jackson has been working on the museum for the past few months after finishing his trilogy “The Hobbit.” He owns a number of planes and artifacts from the era, some of which he has donated to the collection.