Return to Vimy uses an evocative storyline interweaving colourized archives and brief segments of animation to tell the story of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces’ efforts during the First World War. Inspired by the pilgrimage of thousands of yearly visitors to the Vimy Memorial, this is the first time the NFB has colourized its own archives for a film project and the process has revealed previously unseen material in these century-old films of the Great War. Colour brings a new dimension to well-known battle scenes, rarely seen behind-the-line footage and the only panoramic shot of Vimy Ridge, filmed right after the victory.

A young Canadian woman visits the Vimy Memorial to make a charcoal imprint of the engraved name of her great-grandfather who was lost in battle, bringing with her a notebook of sketches and diary entries that he made during months of preparation for the battle to take back Vimy Ridge. The sketches transform into colourized archive footage and take us back in time to revisit the daily lives of the soldiers of the Canadian Corps, witnessing the long and detailed preparation that lead to this legendary battle.

Thanks to advances in digital technology, black-and-white photographs and motion pictures can today be colourized with incredibly realistic results. To create Return to Vimy, the 35 mm archival film copies made from the original wartime material was scanned from sprocket to sprocket to capture the entire surface of the frame— revealing details not seen in previous transfers. The black-and-white images were tone balanced and restored to remove flicker, shakiness, dust and scratches. Because the original film was captured hand-cranked at about 18 frames-per-second, the speed was lowered by 20% to regain a sense of normal motion. The colourist then digitally assigned colours to surfaces in the images, which were balanced to match the appearance of surviving artefacts—creating a very realistic full-colour look of the First World War.