FLASHBACK WINS US HISTORY ORDERS

Indie Flashback TV has further cemented its relationship with US Broadcaster A&E, landing $3m (£1.67m) worth of new business for the History Channel.

Headlining the order are 8x 60-minute series, which will attempt to recreate key battles from the Second World War using a mix of aerial photography and CGI effects.

Flashback managing director Taylor Downing said the series would use original “extremely high quality ”reconnaissance footage to map out actual battle scenes and then add CGI animation to “swoop down” to events on the ground.

“We can start by giving viewers a godlike view of a battle and then swoop down to tell the story of one soldier and what was happening to him, and then zoom back up into the sky and swoop down somewhere else”, he said.

The stories will be based on interviews with surviving soldiers and will also feature archive footage.

The first series, Pacific War, will use images taken by the Allies and the Japanese to examine the war from Pearl Harbour to the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Downing will produce with Steve Baker, Ashley Gething and David Caldwell Evans directing.

The second series will take a European perspective, covering everything from D-Day to Berlin.

Both series are in production and are being lined up for transmission on History Channel’s international feeds sometime next year and could find a UK window on either Five or Channel 4.

Flashback has already successfully used the technique on two previous one-offs, D-Day: The Lost Evidence and Auschwitz: The Forgotten Evidence, for the History Channel.

Meanwhile, Flashback has received an order for two more two-hour specials for the History Channel – one looking at ancient European history and another, which will be filmed in High Definition, looking at an event from the Second World War. These two, which are in the very early stages of production, will be for 2006.

The company is also producing a further four episodes of its Battle Stations series, taking the series total run to 40. Battle Stations, which spotlights the technology used during war, has aired on Channel 4.