How D-Day: The Camera Soldier Preserves Important History Using Immersive Tech
Friday marks 81 years since D-Day, the largest naval, air and land operation in history on June 6, 1944, in Normandy, France. Now, a new documentary will immerse viewers into the action of that pivotal day.
Co-produced by TIME Studios's immersive division and the Emmy-nominated immersive documentary team Targo, D-Day: The Camera Soldier— available on the headset Apple Vision Pro —puts users into footage taken by photographer Richard Taylor, a soldier who filmed the landing on Omaha Beach in northwestern France, which saw the most casualties of all of the five beaches that the Allies targeted. It profiles Taylor's daughter Jennifer Taylor-Rossel, 67, who always struggled to relate to her short-tempered father and only saw her father's D-Day footage after his death. Researching her father's past—and venturing to Normandy from Connecticut—made her feel like she was close to him for once.
'Well, I'm crying,' Taylor-Rossel said after viewing the experience for the first time at TIME's Manhattan office on May 30. She had come armed with his Purple Heart, Silver Star, dog tags, and a folder full of letters he wrote about D-Day and photos from his time at war, even a picture of him eating ice cream in Paris.
During the 20-minute immersive experience, she smiled when she saw footage of her trip to Normandy and gasped loudly when she watched her father get shot in the arm. The first thing she said when she took off the headset was, 'I hope we don't get into another war.'
The immersive experience comes at a time when there are fewer and fewer D-Day veterans alive to talk about what it was like on that fateful day. Immersive media is one key way to preserve stories of people who lived through D-Day for future generations.
Here's a look at the man behind the camera on Omaha Beach and what to expect when you're watching D-Day: The Camera Soldier.
Who was Richard Taylor?
Richard Taylor was born in Iowa in 1907 and left school at the age of 15 to take an apprenticeship at a photography studio. After working as a photographer in New York for several years, he enlisted, at 35, into the Signal Corps in the U.S. Army, charged with documenting World War II. He covered the Battle of the Bulge, Malmedy massacre, and the Battle of Hürtgen Forest.
'Remember we are essentially reporters,' the manual for Signal Corps members says, 'and the job is to get front line news and action…There is little time when in combat for the niceties of photography. Concentrate on good subjects and good basic camera performance, and telling a coherent story. Then you will have done your job.'
In a July 1944, roundup of newsreel footage of D-Day broadcast in U.S. theaters, TIME called Taylor's footage from a landing barge under fire on Omaha Beach 'The finest shot of all.'
When Taylor had Jennifer, he was in his early 50s and had been married twice before. He'd often complain about pain in his feet from too many nights sitting in cold water in foxholes throughout the war. He didn't really talk about D-Day, though she remembers the first time she saw a big scar on his arm, and when she asked him what happened, he stated very matter of factly that he got shot on D-Day. It's thought that he got hit with a piece of shrapnel.
After he died in 2002, Taylor-Rossel found a box of his letters and paraphernalia from the war, but wasn't sure what to do with the items. A decade later, in 2022, a military history expert named Joey van Meesen contacted her, interested in researching Taylor's life and asked her if she saw the footage he shot on D-Day. When she said she had not, he sent it to her. She went out to meet him in Normandy.
Taylor-Rossel describes her father as difficult, remote, and hard to have a relationship with. But 'Normandy was the place where I felt connected with him because I had done all of this research on him.' A product of that research is D-Day: The Camera Soldier.
What it's like to experience D-Day: The Camera Soldier
The Apple Vision Pro projects D-Day: The Camera Soldier onto a big screen, wherever you are viewing it. Users will hear Taylor's biography as they flip through an album of family photos, literally turning the pages themselves.
Then, viewers are plopped down in the middle of Normandy American Cemetery with Joey van Meesen. Taylor-Rossel said she felt tears welling up in her eyes when she was surrounded by the D-Day grave-markers while wearing the headset, 'knowing that my dad was there and survived it, but then you look at all these men that didn't survive it.'
There's one foreshadowing letter written by Taylor in cursive that users can pick up with their hands and move closer to their headset, in which he says he's 'anxious' about D-Day and 'if I live through it, it's going to be rather rough.' Then there's a box of objects that viewers can pick up themselves, like his dog tags, a thermos, a rations box, and a photo of Taylor holding his camera. Users will find it hard to get a grip on this replica of the camera he used on D-Day. That's intentional, says director Chloé Rochereuil: 'What struck me the most when I held it in real life was how heavy it was. It's a very big object, it's very hard to use. It made me just realize how incredibly difficult it must have been for him to carry this equipment while documenting a battlefield. And that makes the work even more significant.'
The experience zooms in on the faces of soldiers, which are colorized. 'They're all like my son's age,' Taylor-Rossel says, marveling at how young the D-Day soldiers were after viewing the experience. As the barge lands on Omaha Beach, viewers begin to hear a male narrator who is supposed to be Richard Taylor, speaking straight from letters that Taylor wrote to family around the time of D-Day. 'In the next six or seven hours, hell would break loose,' he wrote in one. In another, reflecting on the moment when he got hit in the arm by a piece of shrapnel, he wrote, 'Thank God, I made it to the beach without getting more' and described having a hole in his arm 'large enough to insert an egg.'
Rochereuil says she was not trying to do a play-by-play historical reenactment or make a video game. D-Day: The Camera Soldier not only provides a glimpse at what it was like to be on Omaha Beach that day, but it also might appeal to viewers who, like Taylor-Rossel, may have had a hard time getting a loved one who served in World War II to open up about their experience.
'Parents are the closest people to us, but often we don't fully know who they were before we existed—like, what were their dreams? What were their fears?' Rochereuil says. 'Her story touches on something universal, which is a relationship that we can have with one parent.'
'The only way to connect people to history is by making it personal. It's no longer abstract. My hope is that immersive media will make history feel alive and relevant again'
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