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Pushing the (BIG) Envelope: Innovative Ideas for Large Format Films

Apr 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Ellen Wolff

Most giant-screen theaters are attached to the hallowed halls of museums, so it's not surprising that "educational" documentaries have dominated large-format filmmaking for the first quarter century of its existence. But that's changing in a big way--and not only because more commercial theaters now have giant screens and the equipment to project 15 perf/70mm film. Also indicative of change is a vocal group of filmmakers who want to explore the format's artistic potential with more experimental films. While this cumbersome, expensive medium is rarely accessible to nonmainstream filmmakers, they still share a passionate belief that artists inevitably will use 15/70 film for far more than shooting spectacular vistas from mountain peaks and planes.

Some of these self-described "renegades" have dubbed themselves "The Splinter Group" and have been pressing their case for the past three years by organizing an annual Big Shorts film festival to showcase unconventional 15/70 short films. With ongoing financial support from Kodak, Big Shorts has played in Vancouver, Sydney, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Francisco and even had an official place at the '99 gathering of the Giant Screen Theater Association (GSTA) in New York City. When Kodak and Iwerks sponsored Big Shorts in L.A., the program ran the gamut--from the stop-motion animation of the Oscar-nominated More to an interpretation of a sound poem called Primiti Too Taa. What all the filmmakers had in common, noted festival in organizer Tom Huggins in his introduction, "was that they dared to make experimental films."

Calling himself "a cheerleader for this movement," Huggins says, "Finally, people are aware that there's an opportunity to show these films. This large-format 'new wave' has grown out of the need to fill Big Shorts." It was at Huggins' urging, in fact, that filmmakers Edwin Escalante and James Manke created one of the festival's highlights, the dazzling Master Positive. Consisting of images printed from interpositives, the film is a crazy quilt of brilliantly colored footage culled from the commercial 15/70 releases Gold, Whales, and Encounter in The Third Dimension. Of course, the process of printing from IP totally transformed them into something otherworldly. In shots from Gold, for example, the molten metal appears searing cobalt blue.

Escalante heard about the Big Shorts idea through his job at L.A. post house RPG Productions, where he's a production manager. "We work on a good percentage of large-format films, so I've always had those materials around me." Escalante notes that one of RPG's clients is nWave Pictures, whose president is Charlotte Huggins, Tom's wife. "About four years ago, Charlotte mentioned that her husband was trying to put different types of large-format shorts together as an entity. One day, I was sitting with James Manke, who's an editor, and we came up with the idea of putting surreal images onscreen by striking prints from IP. At RPG, we're always striking prints to check an IP, and I've alwaysbeen taken by the luminance of a print from IP. It basically exposes the entire frame and shows as much as possible, which I've always felt an IMAX film should actually do. At the same time, an IP print will throw a great array of fuschias and blues. You get some phenomenal footage from an existing image, and it costs you nothing."

Since Escalante and Manke were planning to compile their film using prints from clients' interpositives, they naturally had to get permission. Escalante remarks: "It was just a question of calling and saying, 'Look we have this idea...' And there wasn't any problem." Tom Huggins suspects that those commercial film producers may have felt some hesitation. "But on the plus side," he says, "those people are interested in seeing experimentation themselves. I guess they also figured that very few people would ever see it! Besides, the images in Master Positive look very different from their original films, and it cost them nothing since that stuff typically goes into the garbage anyway. Which made the whole project sort of Dada, because one of the principles of that movement was to use stuff that was discarded."

For Master Positive, Escalante says that he and Manke "wanted reversal shots, aerials, and anything to put you in some type of trance." "We had two huge platters full of print from IP," he says, "and wound up looking at about 30,000 feet of film, just taking notes. Because with a large-format projector, you cannot rewind and look at something again. We gave ourselves a cut list, then edited it together and added music. We got a lot of costs covered for free, and my boss, Rick Gordon, actually gave me the time to play with this. It took us 19 days."

Escalante recalls, "People came up to us in the lobby [after the premiere at GSTA], asking, 'What's next?'" He hopes to follow Master Positive with other large-format experimental films, calling the possibilities "limitless." Meanwhile, the influence of Master Positive is on display in a new commercial 15/70 release, Ultimate Gs. "The directors and producers of that film," Escalante says, "saw Master Positive in New York, and they have a dream sequence with a print from IP. It worked out wonderfully."

While Big Shorts has introduced new filmmakers like Escalante, it's also served as a venue for previewing new work by acclaimed large-format filmmaker Ron Fricke (Chronos, Baraka, Koyanniskatski). Fricke's two-minute teaser for an upcoming 40-minute film called The Search for Infinity, featuring 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke, was a Big Shorts showstopper. The teaser's swirling, multicolored fractal images, which were generated by a supercomputer at Cinesite/L.A., constitute what Fricke calls "a big cosmic zoom. It is math made cool."

Fricke explains that the idea for the project, which has no precedent in the large-format genre, came to him as he watched a cable documentary about a mathematical construct called the Mandelbrot set. "I literally stumbled onto it. There was this psychedelic pattern playing that looked like it was left over from an acid trip. But when it was explained, I just fell out of my chair. Once you see why some numbers go to zero-to black -and why some numbers just keep going to infinity, you have this big epiphany. You get a sense of the infinite. I saw the potential of what the Mandelbrot set would look like on a large-format screen. No one has ever seen it this big. They've only seen it on a computer screen, which is only a minute area of it. On the large-format screen, you'd see a bigger field. I knew it would make a great film."

After calling some colleagues ("To see if I wasn't off my rocker!"), Fricke began assembling a team. Dr. Jeffrey Kirsch of San Diego's IMAX theater would executively produce. Producer Camille Celluci put Fricke in touch with Clarke, whom he wanted to include as an Oz-like, floating-head guide. "We went to visit Arthur in Sri Lanka," says Fricke, "and he was really keen on this. We filmed his head against green screen using a little digital high-8 camera, which is what's in the trailer-on an IMAX screen! I build large-format cameras, so this was unbelievable to me. Then I got together with Steve Wright at Cinesite and worked out the Mandelbrot set and how Clarke would appear and disappear, and that was really fun."

For its part, Cinesite signed onto the project "as a testbed for our pipeline, to make sure we could do large format, which is an area we want to break into," says production chief Gil Gagnon. "But Steve Wright had to mastermind everything and create the software to pull this off." Wright, a veteran of the seminal CG studio Robert Abel & Associates, knew that rendering the Mandelbrot set for the giant screen would not be trivial. "We had to write a custom Mandelbrot renderer at 4K resolution," Wright says. "Because of the massive rendering time of this project, we knew from the outset that we could only do one render. We couldn't wander through creative space indefinitely. So the key was to help Ron Fricke settle on his pictures."

Because the Mandelbrot set is virtually infinite, the decision-making process could be overwhelming. "Imagine crawling across the continental U.S. with a magnifying glass looking for an interesting piece of terrain," says Wright, whose solution was to sit Fricke down at a PC running a $29 fractal-rendering program. "[Fricke] could cruise around the Mandelbrot set in low-res and play with interesting areas in real-time." After a month of experimentation, Fricke had what he wanted-a zoom through fractals that conveyed the feeling of infinity. Wright's team then handled the two-step process of rendering the gray-scale fractal images and coloring them. "The fractal render is a mathematically annoying thing," admits Wright. "When you've not penetrated very deep, your render times might be 10 or 15 minutes a frame. But Ron wanted us to bore straight in-like a Powers of Ten shot, which means that the last fractal you see is 1.2 billion-trillion times larger than the one we started with. We reached render times of over eight hours per frame, with 2,000 frames to do. When we filmed it out, it took six days, 24 hours a day. From that standpoint, it's one of the largest effects shots ever done."

And that's just the teaser. Fricke has ambitious plans for the full-length version, including finding images from nature that can be synched up with the Mandelbrot set. "For example, if you look at a coastline from the space shuttle, you can take that image and find a complete match for it on the edge of the tree. This film will be about how nature and math are interconnected. There's a huge goo of organic shapes: stained glass windows, Islamic tiles, seahorses, and elephants' trunks. And at the end, there will be a big zoom on the Mandelbrot set similar to the trailer, only you'll flying through it for a good six minutes."

Reaction to this project has been so enthusiastic that Fricke expects to have the final film done by 2001. While that will be the first time that this kind of computer animation reaches the giant screen, Fricke asserts: "CGI is so brilliant in large format. I don't think there's a better format in which to use this digital technology because in large-format, you see everything."

It's not just independent filmmakers who are attempting to push the large-format envelope these days. Come autumn, IMAX plans to release Cyberworld, its compilation of giant-screen stereoscopic animation. Cyberworld will feature new material, including a 3D-CG character animated by Spin Productions, Toronto, and voiced by Jenna Elfman. But one of the film's highlights will likely be a familiar scene: a 15/70 version of a sequence from DreamWorks' 35mm CG hit, Antz.

IMAX has long touted the idea of "re-purposing" conventional films to play in 15/70, and the Antz project put that idea to the test. At Pacific Data Images, the DreamWorks company that created the original film, co-director Tim Johnson said the challenge was a little daunting. "For an IMAX film to be creatively successful," Johnson says, "there's a completely different language than traditional films. What the IMAX screen gives you is peripheral vision, so it's a mistake to just blow up the 35mm frame. What we did was re-size the image by adding more information around it to preserve the scene's original intent."

PDI producer Don MacBain, who shepherded the project with technical expert Craig Ring, said this approach involved going back to the original CG files and creating new geometry. "We added about 200 ants because the original crowds only existed to the edge of the 35mm frame. And where characters were only seen from the waist up, we had to go back and animate them from their waists down."

Complicating the challenge was the fact that Antz's CG images had to be re-rendered for stereoscopic presentation. "Because it's not kind on the eyes to swap lenses from shot to shot in stereo," Johnson explains, "we reexamined all the lenses used in this sequence. We had 17mm lenses cutting to 105mm lenses, which is fine on 35mm, but it's painful in IMAX. So the 17mm became a 50mm and the 105mm became a 70mm, which was tolerable. We weren't able to do what would be kindest on the eyes, which would be to pick one lens for the whole thing."

Each frame in this five-minute sequence took between six and eight hours to render in 3D-CG stereo, recalls MacBain. Originally, the render times for 35mm were between two and three hours. If PDI proceeds with an IMAX version of their upcoming CG feature Shrek, for which MacBain is currently budgeting, rendering times could last up to 20 hours per frame.

While Johnson won't predict whether PDI will develop an "IMAX pipeline" for its future projects, he admits, "It's a blast to see our characters this way. They look more like themselves-more tactile and real, just like they're supposed to be."

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.