"Film footage ? reversed" Topic

I was just watching "narrow eacapes of W W II " on the american heroes channel. It was about the battle of Kohima. There is footage of a Lee/Grant comming up to the tennis court. Now the 75mm gun was on the right side from the commanders position. Making the footage they must have spliced a piece of film in flipped over because it seems they used the same clip but the tank is going left to right and then right to left and the 75mm is on the side facing the camera both times.
I know there will be someone that will say that vetsions were made with the gun on either side because they saw that footage.

You mean my company of left sided 75 mm gunned Lee/Grants in 28 mm that I specially commissioned at £300.00 GBP each, cannot be fielded? I beg to differ sir! I saw it on an old movie reel, It must be true.

And cheers to you too.

I've spotted other news reals of WWII that I thought were backwards.

Relatively easy thing to do, both 'traditionally' and now with the ease of digital.

The 'Traditional' method is simply someone reversing the film stock at some stage while it was being duplicated – remember that nearly all commercial footage would have been copied hundreds of times for distribution. The way to spot this is that everyone is carrying their gear the wrong way round.

Now with everything being computerised it is simply a program script to flip every 'frame' in the digital file, and it was becoming increasingly common for images to be flipped by the 'Art Department' who had no knowledge of or interest in the accuracy of the image, just in the symmetry of the layout.

Those pesky Ringwraiths kept changing their sword arms crossing the river into Rivendell.

link

Or did the editors reverse their film footage too?

I'm sure Ringwraiths are ambidextrous, but what about all those clips of Panzer II's in Normandy!

What about those left-handed Han dynasty halberdiers? They've puzzled ancients gamers for decades.

In the otherwise excellent tank attack scene of "Cross of Iron," several of the shots of T-34s are backwards. Check out this clip at about 38 seconds in:

YouTube link

There are several instances in the Lord of the Rings trilogy where successive images were flipped. I think that was explained in the discussion segments on the director's cuts that is was done deliberately to increase the "footage" of the scene without increasing the cost of additional filming. And so many people won't even notice it – only us "nit-picky" wargamers.

Jim