Battle-Ready

Consider the History Channel. Has there ever been, in the entire panoply of television's glorious cathode-ray run, a basic-cable channel freighted with such a ponderously dull title? Seriously. It's like calling ESPN "the Gym Channel" or titling Lifetime "Mom Zone" or referring to Animal Planet as "the Pedantic Biosphere Appreciation Network." Clearly, someone's marketing department was sleeping in that day.

Nevertheless, there are whole legions of couch-bound history buffs who regularly and willingly skip out on the sheer unadulterated joy of Rupert Murdoch's latest World's Wildest Spring Break Hangovers in favor of yet another (and another, and another) 60-minute exploration of Der Totenfuss: Examining Hitler's Podiatrist and Calvin Coolidge: Lust for Glory.

I fear I am one of them.

This fall, history nerds will have cause to rejoice (or at least pull up an overstuffed Barcalounger) when the History Channel presents First Invasion: The War of 1812, a two-hour special presentation chronicling the travails of a young American nation and the final chapter of the war between then-hyperpowerful Great Britain and those pesky Yanks.

Directed by Gary Foreman (of the multi-award-winning Native Sun Productions), the program (currently being shot in Sony 24p Hi-Definition) is also the crowning achievement of Austin- and San Antonio-based post-production artistic behemoth Match Frame, which, in the company's biggest creative coup to date, will mesh scores of live-action battlefield re-enactors with the bloody pomp and explosive circumstance of the real-world David and Goliath free-for-all that resulted in the burning of the White House and a last-minute tactical turnaround that, literally, (barely) saved the United States at the crucial moment. Obviously, this isn't your father's history class.

"There are definitely challenges in this project," says Ken Ashe, who co-founded Match Frame in 1977 with partners Don White and Michael Bowie. "It's one of those things where, as you speak to Gary, your mouth just keeps falling open because you don't realize how close we came to losing the country at that point. He refers to it as 'the first invasion' because it was on a September 11 when the war first began."

Native Sun's Foreman and the Match Frame crew had worked together in the past, and with the Austin company's wealth of cutting-edge post-production tools -- including Discreet Logic's industry-standard nonlinear editing-and-compositing systems Smoke, Fire, and Inferno, as well as the latest animation software from SoftImage and SXI -- the production is likely to rival anything the History Channel has yet developed. That's saying a lot for a station that has the whole of recorded history as a back-story.

Explains Ashe, "The live-action is to be shot on location -- Gary has relationships with various re-enactors throughout the nation, and in fact he's probably the guy more connected to this world than any other. Right now they're shooting in New Orleans where they're re-enacting the Battle of Fort McKinley. We'll be helping to ... reproduce the feel and excitement of the rockets' red glare. They used the rockets not so much for battle purposes at that early stage of the war but more to intimidate and create a sense of 'shock and awe,' to use a term we've heard lately. So we'll be marrying live-action and animation effects to help bring that to life."

More than your typical post-production facility, Match Frame, which during the Eighties worked on a number of Katzenberg-era Disney projects and continues to be active in everything from commercial projects to short- and feature-film work, utilizes the wealth of Austin's burgeoning creative talent pool. It says something that head editor Stephen Bohl's office contains not only the usual array of nonlinear editing boards and glowing monitors, but also a copy of the Velvet Underground's best-of box set and walls festooned with his own photographic works. The marriage of art and technology, an Austin tradition since day one, is at the core of Match Frame's craft.

And as for the soon-to-be-spectacular-once-again burning of the White House and Battle of New Orleans, "It's right up there with the most complex projects we worked with," says Ashe. "Anytime you marry live-action footage with animation it becomes a particularly intense process to pull off what we call 'photorealistic' work. If it's entirely an animated project you have a great deal more control, but when you mix the two it moves beyond science into the realm of art."

The art of war, that is.