We made four videos for the BBC’s 100th Anniversary of the outbreak of WWI, done in the Explainer format that we developed for BBC Knowledge and Learning — videos that take complex ideas and communicate them to a general audience. 

Editorially, these films work from the macro view of the war withOverview, focussing in on The Origins and then a deeper view to The Trenches, with The Somme as the most granular view. It was interesting to work at different paces and densities of information. The Overview makes the most of every second whereas The Somme is respectfully paced.

This film weaves together the key events and conclusions of the war. We had to edit heavily – both events and detail to create a coherent story.

The origins of WW1 are a famously complex network of linkages, actions, and effects. Key to this film was presenting the actors, motivations, and eventual conditions that sent them to war.

The Trenches was centred on the lives of the men at the Front and different parts of the theatre. It was important to combine the objective, diagrammatic architectural plans of the trench system with photos and film that humanised the men living and dying there.

This and The Trenches operate at a more micro level than the macro ofOverview and Origins. The Somme is a solid telling of the events of a very bloody battle, but editorially we challenged the ‘total failure’ aspect alongside the facts and figures.

These videos depended more heavily on footage and photography than previous films. We spent a couple of months researching at the archives of the Imperial War Museum to source original and compelling footage. We uncovered some fairly strong pictures that haven’t been in the public eye. Editorially, we felt that these would be interesting and robust, but given the BBC Producer Guidelines on depictions of dead people, we had to consider that fairly young children would be watching these videos. 

There is a fair amount of locative explanation here and we wanted the maps to aid the complex explanation of the interwoven sides, treaties and conditions of the outbreak of the war. We avoided using thematic maps with lots of ‘dead soldier’ numbers overlaid. We felt that the whole package communicated the sacrifice and icons of dead solders or sized-bubbles would be glib.