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PV, they are a bit of a cheat. How I did those was like this:
The game 'The Movies' (which is about 15 quid and great fun) allows you to make films from characters which you can model yourself with a simple tweeking program that comes with it. So I simply created the characters of Richard Hillary and Colin Pinckney, plus the other 'extras' in that little utility, the dog is also standard in the game. When I had those, I basically made the people scenes in The Movies game, but I had to employ a bit of trickery to pull it off. Like this...
There are no WW2 Air Force uniforms in that game for your 'actors' but what I did was recolour the WW2 army battledress (which is a prop uniform in the game) blue, and that solved that problem. The car is in the game as standard and you can use that as a prop just as I did.
The backdrops of the airfield and the dispersal hut were drawn in Photoshop, incorporating some screengrabs from BoB2 and CFS3 and imported into The Movies game. When I'd done that, I still had the problem that there is no WW2 oxygen mask or flying helmet in The Movies game, so I cheated and made the shots of the pilots talking with the moving sky background, then saved the movie as an AVI file. When I had the AVI file, I imported it into a 2D animation program called Moho (which is great by the way and cheap too), into which I also imported a cut out picture (PNG file) of an oxygen mask and flying helmet. Then I basically moved the mask and helmet's position on a layer over the footage of the pilots frame by frame.
If you watch the film, you can see that I missed a couple of positions and the actor's head appears briefly near the top edge of the helmet since he isn't really wearing it, but I let it go at that.
The shot of the Bf 109 in the mirror of the Spitfire is also done in Moho, by matting one AVI file over another AVI file of the cockpit, which was taken with FRAPS, so it is effectively a rotoscoped shot moved frame-by-frame and looped (easier to do than I just made it sound, just a bit tedious).
The shot of the flare being fired from the Very pistol was also animated in Moho, with a few bits drawn from scratch. The shot of the parachute being grabbed is the only bit of live footage, and only shows very briefly, but it is me grabbing a genuine Irvin parachute off a table in my back garden while I held my digital camera in the other hand, (if you are quick, you might just spot that there is also an RAF WW2 log book and a Mae West in that shot too).
So basically to make it I used: BoB2, CFS3, FRAPS, Moho, Photoshop, The Movies (plus its Stunts and Effects add on disk) and my digital camera with a few of my things I've collected as an aeroplane nut. It was all tied together in Windows Movie Maker and the sounds (with the exception of some SFX from a sound effects CD) are all my bad acting, recorded with Goldwave, apart from the main music obviously, which is a selection of tracks from the Independence Day movie soundtrack CD.
The 'story' of the film is basically true, with a few concessions to drama, and you might be interested to know that I have quite a few bits of the real Spitfire R6753, after its wreck was excavated some years ago, and believe it or not, a skin panel I have still has the paint on it, so if anyone wants to know exactly what colour a Mark 1 Spitfire was in the Battle of Britain, come round to my house and you can see for yourself! You might be surprised at the brown colour, as I was.
Mostly the film was an experiment with techniques (for another project I am working on), which is why the sound is a bit crappy and compressed, also partly due to the compression of YouTube.
Al
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