In 1942, as the battle for the Pacific raged, a battalion of American soldiers spent 42 days traversing a deadly mountain range to drive the Japanese from Papua New Guinea. They trekked through some of the most geologically-disturbed terrain on earth: a chaotic jumble of sheer mountains and valleys, impenetrable jungle full of malarial mosquitoes, unknown tribes and poisonous snakes, weird icy forests of luminous fungi, and misty peaks where the earth itself seemed haunted. Chronicled in the book The Ghost Mountain Boys by author James Campbell, the journey of these soldiers and their subsequent battle at Buna—suffering a casualty rate of nearly 90%—is an astounding story of human courage and a meditation on the suffering experienced by men in conflict.
While researching this film, I discovered that my great uncle, Kenneth Warnock, served on the island then called New Guinea during WWII. He spent several years in fierce combat, and on his return, rarely spoke of his experiences there.
This August, StoryHouse will travel to Papua New Guinea with author James Campbell to retrace the path taken by these men and help geolocate a downed American C-47. Using interviews and footage from this trip, along with archival material, artistic recreations, satellite imagery and cutting-edge motion graphics, we’ll bring the story of these brave soldiers to life and create a powerful, moving film.
Artistic Vision
An impressive aspect of The Ghost Mountain Boys is its versatility of scope: the author’s willingness to appreciate tiny eddies of detail amidst the greater flows of history. Millions of Japanese soldiers swarm the Pacific, while a lonesome American surgeon pens a letter to his wife, listening to the Blue Danube Waltz. Perspectives of men from across the chain of command are juxtaposed. One minute we’re listening in as General Douglas MacArthur and Edwin F. Harding butt heads over the correct plan of attack for the 32nd Division, the next we are shivering in rainy mists over Ghost Mountain or up to our waists in swamp water with the enlisted men of Company G.
Our film will take a similar approach, constructing a spine out of likewise intimate moments in the experiences of men of the 32nd Division. These moments, selected for their historical and thematic content, will be ordered sequentially against the larger historical backdrop, and interwoven with a modern day trek along that same path. The result will be an immersive experience where the audience member feels connected to the story: not like they are attending a history lecture, but like they are living the story alongside the Ghost Mountain Boys in a real, detailed, visceral way.
Visual Style & Cinematography
Accompanying us as Director of Photography will be Taylor Turner. Taylor’s the perfect man for the job: he’s spent the last 10 years filming in Earth’s wildest places under the most extreme conditions. Head over to his website and watch his reel, you’ll be blown away!
Taylor’s style fits perfectly with our themes and with the island itself being a character in the film: the deep jungles and peaks scarved in mist, the exotic animals and insects, the rich brown and green tones of mud and foliage, even the total darkness of night or the flickering orange of the evening’s cooking fire. It’s a wild, primal environment that hearkens back to our ancestral past. Much like the endeavor of war.
Modern image processing tools help bring archival footage to life! This proof-of-concept video shows footage from New Guinea: the left side of the frame has been scaled and colorized using Artemis and Stable Diffusion AI models.
Archival
One exciting prospect is the rich archival material, much of which is in the public domain. Recent developments in technology have lowered the cost of image processing. We can now enlarge, adjust frame rates, remove artifacts, sharpen and color old archival footage at a very modest cost to our production budget.
I am also greatly interested in using archival material and documents in new, innovative ways. For example, we could imagine an opening sequence: in darkness, we hear the sound of a projector spinning up. The style of the music, title cards, and narration invokes training films of the time. A voice actor declares:
An illustration from Getting About In New Guinea advises the American serviceman to rely on the natives in an unfamiliar and hostile environment.
New Guinea is a primitive, hard country and a new world to men from overseas. You go there to fight a dangerous enemy, the Japanese. But they are not the only enemy. The country itself will fight you with all its forces — its mountains, swamps and forests, its heat and rain, its snakes, crocodiles, scorpions and lice, above all with its mosquitoes and its countless invisible army of disease germs…
These words are from an actual historical document, the Allied Geographical Section’s 1943 pamphlet Getting About In New Guinea. The audience member has become a draftee watching a training film, which through art, graphics and archival footage, advises them how to avoid the crocodiles, build lean-to’s, trap for bandicoots and generally get around in New Guinea. The sequence highlights in a lighthearted yet engaging way the extremity of the conditions these men would face, and just how difficult it would be to prepare soldiers for such conditions, and would make a perfect gateway into the film.
Such uses can be envisioned for various sequences. Historical sequences in general will be great creators of tension in the film, and sequences should be devoted to the Japanese national character and expansion, to Pearl Harbor, to the history of Papua New Guinea, to the impact of malaria and disease on the fighting in the Pacific, to Guadalcanal and the concurrent the fighting in Europe and Africa, and so on.
In this proof-of-concept video, Ghost Mountain looms over a possible route taken by soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 126th Infantry. Using GPS data, Google Earth Studio, and a bit of After Effects wizardry, we can reconstruct the path taken by the original soldiers, all at a fraction of the cost of a big VFX studio.
Writing & Postproduction
An oft-overlooked yet critical aspect of all film endeavors is known as continuity. While watching a film, we all subconsciously construct a a version of the film’s world inside our heads, with its own time and space. We’re searching for signposts, landmarks, things we can connect with to help us imagine ourselves inside that world and better understand it. If the filmmaker doesn’t give us enough information to do this, or suddenly violates our assumptions, we tend to get disoriented and lose interest in what we’re watching because it doesn’t make intuitive sense.
If I see a shot of men hiking in the jungle, I want to know where we are and where we’re headed. If the enemy is taking over islands in the Pacific… I want to see a map that shows that fact! Our story takes place in 1942, which for most people means very little beyond WWII. But what might it mean for the characters in our story? Who won the World Series that year? What’s playing on the radio? Is it (I’ve Got a Gal in) Kalamazoo? What might that mean to the Ghost Mountain Boys, some of whom were actually from Kalamazoo?
One thing I’ve noticed while working on videos about mountain expeditions is that one can fall into the trap of not helping your audience understand where they are. There is often a strong sense of beginning (say, at base camp) and of completion (the summit), but middle of the film might devolve into a kind of montage without regard for time and space. Audiences tune out, and the filmmaker fails to generate sufficient tension such that the final summit feels like a true achievement, for the characters and by proxy the audience. It’s a difficult balance to maintain but one tool I’ve found helpful is quality maps and graphics, correlated very closely with what’s happening on screen.
