MAKING THE DOCUMENTARY

Attempts to secure funding were unsuccessful. The advantages are that the story has not been compromised by any potential demands that that are characteristic of the funding process. The disadvantages are that this documentary took a long time to complete while waiting for the ‘self funding’ process to progress.

Undeterred, the making of the documentary became a labour of love with many hours spent in libraries and archives here in New Zealand and Australia. Finding relevant horse film footage became a challenge. Not many cameramen covered the ANZAC campaign in Egypt and Palestine however source material was available.

To compliment the source film, hundreds of WW1 photos were also found and included. A montage of those killed at Gallipoli is timed to the rhythm of a machine gun firing in slow motion, in an attempt at defining death in surreal terms.

Unfortunately there are no filmed interviews from this period relating to the Anzac Mounted Rifles, but around 1988 the Oral Archives commissioned interviews with surviving WW1 soldiers and fortunately some interviews were from soldiers who were part of the Desert Campaign. Extracts of these interviews are matched to photos taken when these soldiers were in their eighties giving a sense that time has moved on and in the process reminding us of the debt we owe to these old soldiers.

Sound became a wonderful challenge, remembering that WW1 archival film has no sound. This meant that every sound had to be built in the studio from horses walking through the sand to artillery and machine gun fire. Paul Sanderson and Al Kincaid, the sound engineer, were mindful right from the start to be authentic and give justice to history.