27 Jun Armoured Time Machines
Armoured Time Machines is Empty Cup Media’s 4th short documentary (after Forget Me Knots, By Accident and Much Love, Scott). This 11 minute film is about Gulf War veterans being reunited with the same military vehicles they fought the war in 25 years after the conflict ended. Alan Duffy, the president of the Ontario Regiment Museum in Oshawa, has many tanks and he restores them to their original condition. So when Al brought the veterans over from Europe to AQUINO Day at the Regiment Museum, they saw the exact same vehicles in the same state as when they were told to just ‘leave them’ and get on an airplane to be flown home.
Most of the video was filmed in a single day by Carla and Colin. Alan Duffy’s interview was shot separately, and we needed to license Gulf War footage for one spot in the film. We used www.buyoutfootage.com/ to find the very specific type of footage we needed. Sifting through the raw news footage from the war was very real. These weren’t staged shots with CG and stunt doubles – the vehicle fires were real; the people surrendering were real; and the infra red camera shots of bridges being blown up were real. Editing this documentary was very different than all the others because this raw and authentic footage we used.
This film isn’t a political film – it only looks at tank restoration, what it was like to live in a tank during the Gulf War and how the veterans feel about seeing the “4th member of their crew” again. The film doesn’t glorify war either. It’s a film about family, community and art restoration.