Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Start at the beginning

This blog, and eventually the full website, will document my efforts to produce a roughly 20 minute animated short film about the extraordinary experience my grandfather had in the First World War.

My aim is to have a 1 to 2 minute trailer done for Remembrance Day this year, and the full film ready to show for November 2014, 100 years on from the start of the war.

I've just begun reading about one of the key battles my grandfather took part in, and the following passage is from Arthur Conan Doyle's account:

 "Every company of the advancing units had been instructed to fall in behind its own marked tank.  At 6.20, just after dawn, in a favouring haze, General Ellis gave the signal, his iron-clad fleet flowed forward, the field of wire went down with a long splintering rending crash, the huge fagots were rolled forward into the gaping ditches, and the eager infantry crowded forward down the clear swathes which the monsters had cut.
At the same moment the guns roared out, and an effective smoke-barrage screened the whole strange spectacle from the German observers.
The long line of tanks magnified to monstrous size in the dim light of early dawn, the columns of infantry with fixed bayonets who followed them, all advancing in silent order, formed a spectacle which none who took part in it could ever forget."

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