The beginnings

A quick background on the history of this channel

Marc (brown-haired presenter), Floris (blonde presenter), Alain (shoe-maker in ‘Caliga’, beggar in ‘Money’ etc.) are the three people behind this channel. We are a group of friends from the Netherlands who started re-enacting about three and a half years ago. It was just the three of us getting the equipment and going out into nature, dressing up Roman and getting a feel for the ancient soldier’s life. But a purpose was lacking, so Alain proposed to start an Instagram channel, seeing how we had nice photos anyway. And so we did, and this quickly turned into the main focus of our hobby; posting beautiful photos, creating as much of an authentic setting as possible, adding in a bit of information on topics of ancient history.

Hardly half a year later or so, we got contacted by Invicta. Through some act of the gods, he had found out about us already, and – apparently – felt inspired enough by our work to reach out to us. He asked us if we could make certain video footage for his channel. Of course, telling your favorite historic Youtuber ‘no’ is not an option. So we quickly undertook our first steps in becoming filmmakers, learning how to shoot video instead of making just photos (see Invicta’s ‘What was Watchtower Duty like on the Roman Frontier?’ – clearly early material of ours :P).

Early on in this process of learning to film, we came to realize that there’s not a single YouTube-channel doing something with live-action re-enactment in it. So, Marc being the positive-impulsive guy that he is, came up with the idea of starting our own YouTube channel; the Instagram wasn’t really satisfying our need for a purpose anymore anyway. After the initial dismissal and ridicule had waned – Marc persisting in his idea all the while – followed some long, deep pensive moments of silence, and some subsequent debating and questioning the odds of success. After a while, we agreed to just go for it; on paper the odds were in our favor, this was gonna be unique after all! The only thing betting against us, was the fact that we had absolutely zero experience in filming or editing, let alone producing an entire cohesive and entertaining documentary in the most challenging of styles …

The next two-and-a-half years flew by, learning the craft of documentary-maker from scratch. We learned how to film properly and stable (this one requires some definite natural talent for light-footedness and balance – I’m looking at you Marc), how to edit video (still in progress but getting there – go Marc!), audio-recording on-site and in a studio (this was a nightmare in so many ways – thanks (stunt!) airplanes, heavy wind, never-ending lawnmowers and leaf-blowers!), creating art and an artstyle (thanks to our Argentinian friend German (pronounced as Herman, just so you know), crafting so many cool authentic pieces of equipment (thanks handyman Alain!) and of course the research and scriptwriting (Floris – hey ma, looks it’s me!).

So, a couple of years later, with a handful of ready-to-go documentaries in stock, we finally went live last summer. We’re still posting ‘old’ videos as of now, but stock is running out in high pace so we’re working our butts off to try and keep up the pace as long as possible. Hopefully by the time we run out of videos, we make a nice buck from this all and can take more time off from work to dedicate ourselves more to this channel. We can only hope … and keep on working …

Hope you enjoyed a bit of background to get more of a picture of us and our work. In the meantime we’re preparing another day of filming this weekend, so we’ll post some pics soon!