Today we got a glimpse behind the scenes of „artes“ international documentary „14 Diaries of the Great War“. With a lenght of 8 episodes á 15 Minutes it is boasting a mix of fiction, documentary and animation.
It took five years to make the documentary as something original, emotional and authentic that’s also multi-perspective and informative, using drama scenes, archive footage and models combined. With using a smaller theme in the drama parts that reflects the bigger theme in the archive parts, they made it look more authentic. That helped to implement the material they had, like the diaries of children, who weren’t actually involved in the war, but on the other hand suffered the consequences.
To get the best out of the documentary and to interest as much people as possible, they re-dressed it as a drama series, which was made all over the world, to tell the war out of different national perspectives.That was something new, something in honour to give a new sight on the events for people who often just knew the sight of their own country.
Build up around the project is a multimedia net consisting of an exhibition in Dresden, a series for children, books and webformats.The expectations of the web experience was to resive a web experience about World War I and interest people in it. To make this possible a 2014 news website with 1914 facts was created.
How will they continue?
“14 Diaries of the Great War” tells the story in the time from 1914 to the end of November 1918, so the next season will start in the end of November and continue up to September 1939. There will be the the same partners on board and it will be the same format, but it will be slightly adapted.
And while working on the second season, that approximately will be shown in 2017, they are allready thinking about the third season, the season about the second world war.
Text: Lisa Mundt. Bild: Medienforum Mittweida.
