When I am working, I listen to films and series that contain loads of dialog. This evolved from listening to DVD commentaries of films that I had already viewed. Commentaries are a great way to have access to the filmmaking process, how decisions were made, and their results.
Recently I listened to the first season of Land Girls which was based on the Women’s Land Army in Britain during World War II. When I view films about historic events, I always wonder about their accuracy. After viewing them, I perform a google search to learn a bit more about the time and events.
When I searched for “Land Girls” I found that during the Second World War, women joined the Women’s Land Army. They replaced farm workers who were serving in the war, which is akin to those who replaced factory workers. The factory workers I knew about, but hadn’t thought about farm workers. Odd since I grew up in a farming community in the Mid West.
About the Code Technique Used–
In the third episode an over zealous, perhaps mad sergeant, used a code template to expose a presumed collaborator. The code template was a card with openings laid over a letter exposing hidden information. The individual attempting to find a coded message in some text, could look for specific types of words and numbers, and presume the combination to be a message.
I gave this a go using a paragraph from Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer , a book that happened to still be on my desk from a previous post.
An image of the original text is followed by a quick Photoshop code template and an image of the code template over the original text.
The arbitrary selection of words has nothing to do with anything. Interpretation mistakes can be made. This is often the case with works of art. Folks come to the work with their ideas and experiences. Their interpretation can be completely wrong, forcing something onto the work that isn’t there.