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

Most giant-screen theaters are attached to the hallowed halls of museums,so it's not surprising that "educational" documentaries have dominatedlarge-format filmmaking for the first quarter century of its existence. Butthat's changing in a big way--and not only because more commercial theatersnow have giant screens and the equipment to project 15 perf/70mm film. Alsoindicative of change is a vocal group of filmmakers who want to explore theformat's artistic potential with more experimental films. While thiscumbersome, expensive medium is rarely accessible to nonmainstreamfilmmakers, they still share a passionate belief that artists inevitablywill use 15/70 film for far more than shooting spectacular vistas frommountain peaks and planes.

Some of these self-described "renegades" have dubbed themselves "TheSplinter Group" and have been pressing their case for the past three yearsby organizing an annual Big Shorts film festival to showcase unconventional15/70 short films. With ongoing financial support from Kodak, Big Shortshas played in Vancouver, Sydney, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Franciscoand even had an official place at the '99 gathering of the Giant ScreenTheater Association (GSTA) in New York City. When Kodak and Iwerkssponsored Big Shorts in L.A., the program ran the gamut--from thestop-motion animation of the Oscar-nominated More to an interpretation of asound poem called Primiti Too Taa. What all the filmmakers had in common,noted festival in organizer Tom Huggins in his introduction, "was that theydared 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. Thislarge-format 'new wave' has grown out of the need to fill Big Shorts." Itwas at Huggins' urging, in fact, that filmmakers Edwin Escalante and JamesManke created one of the festival's highlights, the dazzling MasterPositive. Consisting of images printed from interpositives, the film is acrazy quilt of brilliantly colored footage culled from the commercial 15/70releases Gold, Whales, and Encounter in The Third Dimension. Of course, theprocess of printing from IP totally transformed them into somethingotherworldly. In shots from Gold, for example, the molten metal appearssearing cobalt blue.

Escalante heard about the Big Shorts idea through his job at L.A. posthouse RPG Productions, where he's a production manager. "We work on a goodpercentage of large-format films, so I've always had those materials aroundme." Escalante notes that one of RPG's clients is nWave Pictures, whosepresident is Charlotte Huggins, Tom's wife. "About four years ago,Charlotte mentioned that her husband was trying to put different types oflarge-format shorts together as an entity. One day, I was sitting withJames Manke, who's an editor, and we came up with the idea of puttingsurreal images onscreen by striking prints from IP. At RPG, we're alwaysstriking prints to check an IP, and I've alwaysbeen taken by the luminanceof a print from IP. It basically exposes the entire frame and shows as muchas possible, which I've always felt an IMAX film should actually do. At thesame time, an IP print will throw a great array of fuschias and blues. Youget some phenomenal footage from an existing image, and it costs younothing."

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

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

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

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

Fricke explains that the idea for the project, which has no precedent inthe large-format genre, came to him as he watched a cable documentary abouta mathematical construct called the Mandelbrot set. "I literally stumbledonto it. There was this psychedelic pattern playing that looked like it wasleft over from an acid trip. But when it was explained, I just fell out ofmy chair. Once you see why some numbers go to zero-to black -and why somenumbers just keep going to infinity, you have this big epiphany. You get asense of the infinite. I saw the potential of what the Mandelbrot set wouldlook 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 ofit. On the large-format screen, you'd see a bigger field. I knew it wouldmake a great film."

After calling some colleagues ("To see if I wasn't off my rocker!"), Frickebegan assembling a team. Dr. Jeffrey Kirsch of San Diego's IMAX theaterwould executively produce. Producer Camille Celluci put Fricke in touchwith 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 reallykeen on this. We filmed his head against green screen using a littledigital high-8 camera, which is what's in the trailer-on an IMAX screen! Ibuild large-format cameras, so this was unbelievable to me. Then I gottogether with Steve Wright at Cinesite and worked out the Mandelbrot setand how Clarke would appear and disappear, and that was really fun."

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

Because the Mandelbrot set is virtually infinite, the decision-makingprocess could be overwhelming. "Imagine crawling across the continentalU.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 $29fractal-rendering program. "[Fricke] could cruise around the Mandelbrot setin low-res and play with interesting areas in real-time." After a month ofexperimentation, Fricke had what he wanted-a zoom through fractals thatconveyed the feeling of infinity. Wright's team then handled the two-stepprocess of rendering the gray-scale fractal images and coloring them. "Thefractal render is a mathematically annoying thing," admits Wright. "Whenyou've not penetrated very deep, your render times might be 10 or 15minutes a frame. But Ron wanted us to bore straight in-like a Powers of Tenshot, which means that the last fractal you see is 1.2 billion-trilliontimes larger than the one we started with. We reached render times of overeight hours per frame, with 2,000 frames to do. When we filmed it out, ittook six days, 24 hours a day. From that standpoint, it's one of thelargest effects shots ever done."

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

Reaction to this project has been so enthusiastic that Fricke expects tohave the final film done by 2001. While that will be the first time thatthis 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 formatin which to use this digital technology because in large-format, you seeeverything."

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

IMAX has long touted the idea of "re-purposing" conventional films to playin 15/70, and the Antz project put that idea to the test. At Pacific DataImages, the DreamWorks company that created the original film, co-directorTim Johnson said the challenge was a little daunting. "For an IMAX film tobe creatively successful," Johnson says, "there's a completely differentlanguage than traditional films. What the IMAX screen gives you isperipheral vision, so it's a mistake to just blow up the 35mm frame. Whatwe did was re-size the image by adding more information around it topreserve the scene's original intent."

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

Complicating the challenge was the fact that Antz's CG images had to bere-rendered for stereoscopic presentation. "Because it's not kind on theeyes to swap lenses from shot to shot in stereo," Johnson explains, "wereexamined all the lenses used in this sequence. We had 17mm lenses cuttingto 105mm lenses, which is fine on 35mm, but it's painful in IMAX. So the17mm became a 50mm and the 105mm became a 70mm, which was tolerable. Weweren't able to do what would be kindest on the eyes, which would be topick one lens for the whole thing."

Each frame in this five-minute sequence took between six and eight hours torender in 3D-CG stereo, recalls MacBain. Originally, the render times for35mm were between two and three hours. If PDI proceeds with an IMAX versionof their upcoming CG feature Shrek, for which MacBain is currentlybudgeting, rendering times could last up to 20 hours per frame.

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