The Making of Days in Conflict

To celebrate the release on Mac and PC computers of the multi-award winning WW1 interactive documentary series,
a look back on crafting this interactive trove of Australian wartime history.

Gallipoli

The six chapters of Days in Conflict were produced between 2014 and 2018, but the origin of the series dates back to 2009, when I was a creative director at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, leading a team of producers, designers and developers exploring new ways of delivering content. We had just finished delivering the first version of ABC iview, and one of my colleagues, Meena Tharamajah, had returned from a trip to Gallipoli. She was deeply impressed by how important witnessing the geography of the place was in understanding the events of the Gallipoli Campaign. At the same time, we were exploring the possibilities of 3D experiences in web browsers, and these two ideas came together as the proposition for an interactive documentary about Gallipoli, that would explore the history of the ill-fated invasion from a fresh perspective, telling the story of the first day, allowing you to examine the events where and when they happened through an interactive 3D map space that also appended multimedia details, such as diaries and profiles of soldiers, to these events.

Developed in a technology that is largely redundant today, called Adobe Flash, the finished documentary was available through web browsers and distributed to schools across the country on disc. It won several awards at the time, including the prestigious Inaugural AACTA Screen Innovation Award, by the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts.

Remastering for the Centenary

As we all know, digital technology continues to improve at an incredible pace. By 2014 the method we had used to produce Gallipoli was beginning to show its age. Today, Adobe Flash is no longer officially supported at all. With the end of 2014 marking the Centenary of World War One, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to remaster the documentary, and especially to translate its user interface to multi-touch devices, which had begun to soar in popularity. Apple’s iPad and all sorts of other touch devices were reinventing how people were interacting with immersive content, creating a more natural user interface language. I was keen to use this new interface language to improve the experience of the original documentary. This initial idea to remaster Gallipoli transformed into the full series of six apps that are available today.

Five new apps meant a deep dive into Australia’s wartime record beyond the research and development previously undertaken to produce Gallipoli: the first day. What follows is a look at some of the techniques we used to arrive at the series’ unique interactive features.

Plotting Events

In order to lift the story of a battle off the page of history and into the space and time-based measures of an interactive battlefield, it’s necessary to plot that battle’s events on a map. In this way you can re-enact the action, derived from the historical record of regimental diaries and the work of academic historians. Here you can see a map of the Battle of Fromelles, with make-shift flags pinned to the locations of events. Each flag has indexes at least three vectors of information: for instance, the time of the event, what it was that happened and who it happened to.

With a physical plotting of events complete, the battle as it unfolded can be transcribed into a digital workflow, and eventually look like the finished virtual battle field shown in the video below. Note that as the timeline changes, all the events appear at their respective time and place, and with the various forms of multimedia appended in the right hand menu, once the event is selected.

For the chapters of the various apps that explain the battles themselves, we developed an animation editor that allowed me to edit the action to a narration I’d previously recorded with Lucy Bell, Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving, and which guided the animation. As the scripted camera moves around the map, timed to the narration, explosions, arrows, divisional flags and other annotations are inserted to help describe the recreations of the battles.  

Below are two examples of battles sequences as they appear in the finished apps. The first video begins at the Battle of Fromelles, before exploring other sections and apps (note, this video does not include sound). The second is an unabridged recording of a chapter on the Battle of Broodseinde (including sound), from the Third Ypres app.

SOUND DESIGN

I worked with two wonderful sound designers on the apps - Roberto Salvatore and Andrew Stevenson. One of the great pleasures of the project was recording the audio for the series, and designing the soundscapes of dioramas and battles. When a project’s budget doesn’t allow for all the things you might want to do, sound is an incredible evocative medium for making up potential gaps in visualisations. Roberto and Andrew mastered amazing soundscapes. Here are some examples:

It was also wonderful to work with exceptionally talented actors: breathing life into the diaries, reflections and poetry of the times. I asked celebrated Australian actors Lucy Bell, Richard Roxuburgh and Hugo Weaving if they would collaborate on the series and their performances create a powerful backbone to the various elements of storytelling and documenting. Here are some examples of their performances:

Maps and Globes

The first four apps in the series rely on the actual battlefields as their focus. But with the move in the last two apps to more thematic aspects of the war, namely the role of women and the experience on the Home Front, it made sense to modify the interface to better reflect the content.

In these last two apps in the series, the landscape of battle is replaced by a detailed representation of the Earth. Instead of moving through time, the slider on the left of the screen now moves you around a globe populated with icons where, for instance, Australian nurses were deployed, or relevant Home Front experiences occurred.

One of the great advantages of an interactive map is that you can view the battlefield from all angles and understand the geography of war, as well as the inter-relationships between. Similarly, the globe interface allows you to rapidly navigate the thematic aspects of a war that encompasses the world.

It’s always quite a surprise to see how geographically distant Australia was from the theatres of the First World War, and yet the nation played a crucial role in Allied victory, whether it was the strategic influences of Australian general such as John Monash, or the decisive role of Anzac mounted troopers in the Middle East.

Dioramas

The series took its inspiration for scene-setting from the well-known crafts of model-making and dioramas that are a signature method of storytelling adopted by museums the world over. Dioramas were used in three ways throughout the series. They began as pure story-telling devices and make up the majority of chapters in the ‘story of the day’ component of the first app Gallipoli: the first day.

With subsequent apps in the series, dioramas became interactive environments, such as trenches, sections of a town, a pillbox, a tank, and detailed studies of individual soldiers and nurses. These environments are essentially frozen moments in time, just like at a museum, and your perspective is the only thing moving through this frozen moment.

My favourite non-interactive dioramas include Journey to Passchendaele, the recreation of the city of Ypres, Chilwell Munitions Factory No.6, and Mustafa Kemal’s famous order to repel the Anzac advance. And among the interactive ones, I especially like the individual soldier and nurse profiles and the town of Beersheba.

Expertise and new ways of teaching history

The Days in Conflict series is telling the history of Australia’s wartime record, but in a way that’s very different to what the conventional approach of books, films and television documentaries. This newer medium of interactive documentary allows for existing media to be collected and connected together. We chose to provide two courses of interaction with this multimedia content. One allows you to have the story of the battle (or theme of the app) told to you, while in the other, you find your own way. A thorough experience relies on taking both pathways at your own pace. Content is chaptered and broken down into parts, so that you can approach the whole experience like a non-linear book, dipping in for short periods or really getting immersed.

The content is also tiered, with an abundance of detail for those keen to delve into it, alongside comprehensive overviews.

Throughout the series, we were accompanied by expert academics who helped research events, conditions and fact-checked the series’ storytelling in order to ensure it was as accurate as possible, especially when we were offering in many cases, a more pedantic and detailed look at battles that had until now been mostly recorded only in words.

Academics and military historians who worked with us on the series included: Associate Professor Harvey Broadbent from Macquarie University; William Westerman and Melea Hampton at the Australian War Memorial; Professor Melanie Oppenheimer from University of South Australia; DVA historian Ian Hodges; Major General (retired) Mike O’Brien; Head historian for the Australian Army, Roger Lee; Associate Professor of Ottoman Military History at University of New South Wales, Mesut Uyar; Governor General of Australia (retired) Sir Peter Cosgrove; New Zealand military historian Christopher Pugsley; Turkish Ambassador (retired), Murat Ersavci.

Materiel & Resources

Indexing all the content that supports presentation of each app is a section called “Materiel.” This an army word for resources, and beyond the battlefield or globe of each app, this section is where you’ll find indexed most of the content. It’s rich pickings if you like looking at archival photographs and film, researching profiles, exploring models and dioramas, scrutinising military trees, or listening to diaries evocatively narrated by Lucy Bell, Richard Roxburgh, Hugo Weaving and others.

Each of the apps in the series also has an accompanying Teacher’s Resource, which provides classroom/homework activities aligned with the Australian history curriculum, from Year 9. These PDFs are available from the series’ official website on ABC Education, and were created by the History Teachers’ Association of Victoria, who describe the Days in Conflict series as:

The full series is made available for free, worldwide, and is available on iOS and most Android tablet computers, and from mid-Feb, on Mac & PC computers.

Watch a trailer below, or click here for more on the series, or visit the official ABC website here (launching in mid Feb).