Video Production - New Zealand: Documentary & TV - Nixon Pictures Massacre at Passchendaele Project

Documentary making is our passion. Be it a personal ambition or part of someone else's desire to tell the world their story - we will listen, shoot and give it all the attention it deserves.
Bruce Nixon

he loss of life on any scale is always tragic, and yet it seems even more so when that life has ended for no apparent gain or justifiable cause. It is true that 'there is no greater love than that of a man who lays down his life for another' and perhaps it was for that very reason, thousands of New Zealand soldiers knowingly went to their deaths within a few short hours on the morning of the 12th of October, 1917.

The body count, once the guns fell silent was appalling, with hundreds more yet to succumb to death's insatiable appetite. New Zealand, with its small population of just one million people had just suffered its worst ever military disaster and largest loss of life in a single event - which is still unequalled to this day.

Such a tragedy would normally be examined by a court of law or a governing body to establish why it occurred and who was to blame. Then once questions had been answered and boundaries put in place to prevent such a reoccurrence happening again, a national day of remembrance would be officiated. In this case however, tragedy was to follow tragedy... A whole nation - its government and its people were so shocked in 1917 that they dealt with the grieving process in the only way they knew how - they buried it along with their dead fathers, husbands and sons... for nearly 100 years!

As a result of this self-denial, here we now are, three generations later, emerging with questions and demands to know just what did happen at Passchendaele and why haven't we been taught about this event by our parents or in our schools? Was our government right to suppress history from us? Who was to blame and what can we do about it now, if anything?

With the support of author and historian, Glyn Harper and the permission of HarperCollins Publishing, this proposed documentary will attempt to examine and expose all these questions shrouding our darkest day.

e want this documentary to pay a fitting tribute to both those who lost their lives and those who survived. It needs to portray the conditions and the actual scale of the battlefield for the viewer - who up until now still can't envisage what it must have been like. We want it to be presented by a well respected and recognised personality who has a passion for this subject. In order to achieve these objectives we are aiming for the following treatment:

fter going through a long list of possible presenters and personalities ranging from prominent film directors to authors, we have settled upon a person who is a highly respected war correspondent with world-wide appeal. As this project is still in its infancy, we cannot name names just yet. They have however expressed a strong desire to be involved pending the details and formal agreements that need to be established first.
The viewer will be taken on a journey which will move backwards and forwards seamlessly from New Zealand to Belgium and from 1917 to the present. We are conscious of previous attempts to delve into this subject that have turned into travel shows and have subsequently lost their prime objective. Other attempts have been too short or watered down

due to the large amount of extraneous information. Massacre at Passchendaele; The New Zealand Story, will be a historically accurate study and dissection of what exactly happened, with careful consideration to content and duration.

t will be visually supported by the latest CGI graphics that will put the viewer right into the front line where there will be no excuse for failing to comprehend the 'hell' that our troops faced. For the very first time, the battle itself will be recreated in high definition and condensed into a shorter duration but still retaining all the key events. The same quality as used in the Lord of the Rings films, Troy, The Kingdom of Heaven and War and Peace can be expected with all the elements that were present on that morning. Now with the progress of technology we can create

realistic rain, cloud, smoke, water, explosions and lighting. The advantage in having the final rendered battle is that we can then move and zoom the camera in from any desired angle or distance.

Using illustrations and photographs of soldiers, weapons, uniforms and the appearance of the landscape, we will be able to ensure that the details are as accurate as possible. This will be an incredibly arduous and expensive task to achieve but it will be the closest anyone has ever come to portraying the scale and the realism of this event. War journalist, Philip Gibbs, wrote in 1917 "Nothing that has been written is more than the pale image of the abomination of those battlefields, and no pen or brush has yet achieved the picture of that Armageddon in which so many of our men perished." We realise that nothing will ever compare to the actual event, but we hope to get as close we can.

nother wonder of the modern world, and one that we have at our disposal is a gyro-stabilised camera system mounted on a helicopter. Based near Ieper, in Belgium, we will be able to film high definition aerial scenes and integrate them into the 1917 trench maps using 3D topographical mapping techniques. Seen here on the right, we can produce the trench maps showing the terrain and then move our simulated camera to skim and fly about the map at scaled heights and

headings. Once the data is recorded, we will then be able to fly over the existing land area today, at the same heights and headings - integrating them both together. The viewer will gain an extra understanding of exactly what was going on and where.

istory has its fair share of opinionated interpretations and in this case, the battle of Passchendaele in 1917 also suffers from varying degrees of actuality and myth. In order to best portray the events that day we have engaged the well-respected services of Military Historian and Author, Glyn Harper. Glyn is Associate Professor of Military studies at the NZ Army's Military Institute and is Director of Massey University's Centre for Defence Studies. A former teacher, he joined the Australian Army in 1988 and after eight years transferred to the New Zealand Army, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. Glyn is the author of Massacre at Passchendaele: The New Zealand Story, Spring Offensive, and just recently, Dark Journey, amongst other titles. Glyn will accompany us to Belgium during the filming process and assist

he target for this program is a wide national audience. Individuals with a passion for history, a sense of pride and nostalgia for New Zealand or a fascination for war. The typical viewer would vary in age from 9 to 99, both male and female. It would be made available to New Zealand broadcasters as well as Australian and English overseas broadcasters. A DVD will also be released with a simultaneous 100th anniversary re-release of the book 'Massacre at Passchendaele: The New Zealand Story' by publisher HarperCollins.

Other uses for the documentary will be for educational study and resource.

"It had a searing and traumatic effect on the New Zealand population in 1917. It is true that it has not had the visibility in the New Zealand consciousness in more recent decades that Gallipoli's had or maybe even the Somme ... but Passchendaele should never be forgotten."

"1917... I suppose that a century hence men and women will think of that date as one of the world's black years flinging it's shadow forward to the future until gradually new generations escape from it's dark spell. ...the colour of 1917 is not black but red, because a river of blood flowed through its changing seasons and there was a great carnage of men."