The folks at IMAX Corp. believe they’ve seen the future of cinema: It’s seven stories tall and wants to boggle your mind.
In “T-Rex–Back to the Cretaceous,” which opens Friday, no one is safe as gargantuan dinosaurs poke their reptilian snouts into the audience–as if in search of something to satisfy a monstrous appetite–and boulders roll off the ultralarge screen, into the laps of startled children and adults who can’t help but dodge the celluloid apparitions. After nearly a half-century of false starts, the promise of 3-D filmmaking is frightfully realized in a movie that integrates traditional Hollywood storytelling with high-tech sleight-of-hand.
” `T-Rex’ is meant to utilize 3-D in the context of telling a story you really couldn’t tell as effectively any other way,” argues the film’s director, Brett Leonard. “It really blends the art forms in a way no other medium has done. It’s not a gimmick, it’s a new storytelling medium.”
Leonard, who advanced the concept of virtual reality in such films as “The Lawnmower Man” and “Virtuosity,” feels that IMAX 3-D represents “a great medium for a character story. You feel as if you’re in the skin space of the characters–you feel like you’re in their environment in a way you can’t get with 35 mm.
“It breaks that fourth wall, and, yet, it’s still cinema–but in a scale you can’t get in a theatrical experience.”
What further distinguishes “T-Rex” from previous large-format 2-D and 3-D efforts is the Ontario-based company’s longterm commitments to narrative and computer-generated imaging, as well as a desire to attract audiences preferring entertainment to education.
Such museum-friendly films as “Across the Sea of Time,” “Grand Canyon” (not the 1991 Lawrence Kasdan film starring Danny Glover and Kevin Kline), “The Living Sea,” “Into the Deep” and the long-running “To Fly” helped establish the format among curious moviegoers, especially school and community groups. As IMAX has expanded into the malls, however, the need to produce and exhibit less-institutional fare only has heightened.
Although not strictly an entertainment, the consistently compelling “Everest” (produced in 2-D by MacGillivray Freeman Films) has been able to attract audiences interested as much in the climbers’ dramatic personal struggles, as they are in nature’s grandeur and the sport of mountaineering. Benefitting from hype surrounding Jon Krakauer’s best seller “Into Thin Air,” “Everest” became a veritable blockbuster, generating $60 million in box-office receipts in 35 weeks of exhibition in fewer than 75 theaters worldwide (it opens in Chicago next spring).
“T-Rex,” which opens Friday at theaters on Navy Pier and in Lincolnshire, tells the story of an eminent paleontologist (Peter Horton) who’s too distracted by his work to notice that his daughter (Liz Stauber) has become a formidable student in the field, as well. She knows she’s loved but can’t get dad to take her on one of his digs in Alberta’s Dinosaur Park.
Interesting 3-D elements are integrated seamlessly into the 45-minute narrative. But the real fun comes during a wild four-minute segment in which the teenager magically comes face-to-face with a tyrannosaurus in its natural habitat.
“What we’re going into now is making purely entertainment-oriented family films in IMAX 3-D,” said Leonard, whose L-Squared Entertainment is in production on an large-format movie starring Siegfried & Roy. “It’s a beast of a medium to handle from both a creative and technical standpoint, and `T-Rex’ is an important first step. . . . It delivers an entertainment experience that’s beyond the other IMAX 3-D movies specifically, and, at the same time, it’s still an educational experience. So, it’s a hybrid.”
The most formidable problem facing the increasing number of filmmakers working in the large-format medium–including such companies as Iwerks, Showscan, Nwave, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Mainframe and Sony Classics–is the unwieldy nature of the cameras. A 3-D unit can weigh as much as 240 pounds fully mounted, while 2-D machines generally run from 50 to 100 pounds.
Because the frames of film are 10 times larger than in conventional 35 mm., much more data is accumulated through the camera eye. Thus, lighting demands are increased and attention to detail in costuming and set design becomes a paramount concern.
“Because of their weight and size, there’s been almost no camera movement in previous 3-D IMAX films,” said Leonard, who shot much of “T-Rex” on location in Alberta. “You shoot two strips of film simultaneously–one for the left eye and one for the right eye–then you create the dinosaurs stereoscopically in a computer, which is easy because computer graphics already are created in 3-D (but shot in 2-D). In compositing those two images together, you have to get the dinosaur to be exactly in the right volumetric space of the stereoscopic background image.
“I’d say there’s about five times the detail in the texture maps used to create the look and feel of our T-Rex than the one in `Jurassic Park.’ It’s a 10-times-bigger image and it comes 3 feet in front of your face–if the tooth-decay maps are off, you know it isn’t real.”
To further ensure credibility, actors did their own stunts and special cranes and riggings were constructed to put the heavy cameras as close to the rocky cliffs–where dinosaur eggs are discovered–as possible.
Likewise, before a cinematic assault on the world’s highest peak could be attempted, the “Everest” team practically had to reinvent the IMAX 2-D camera. Its assembled weight was reduced to 37 pounds (the body came in at a manageable 22 pounds), while special lubricants and a crank option had to be added to ensure it would work in temperatures approaching 40 degrees below zero.
According to IMAX chief Brad Wechsler–whose company now controls 180 screens (40 in 3-D) in 24 countries–advances in digital technology will produce cameras that are faster, lighter and quieter. Digital devices also will allow the manipulation of large-format images and data, in ways similar to those employed by filmmakers working in 35 mm.
“We’re going to be a much friendlier medium to work in,” he said. “Another thing that’s very exciting for us is to take other people’s digital content and repurpose it into IMAX–whether that’s `A Bug’s Life,’ `Toy Story’ or `Antz.’ . . . Disney, DreamWorks and Pixar are making those movies for IMAX, even though they don’t really know it.
“While those movies are shown in 2-D, they’re composed in 3-D–in computers–and there’s only one large-scale 3-D delivery system in the world, and that’s ours.”
Wechsler anticipates a time in the not too distant future when feature-length computer-animated films are released in IMAX 3-D after their initial run in a traditional theater, and before a video or pay-per-view release. The company has also approached several animation houses to gauge their interest in creating 3-D cartoons in which oversized characters literally perform their antics within inches of a viewer’s face.
Because of prohibitive costs, older domed theaters likely won’t benefit from the new 3-D technology, which plays well on flat screens between 7 and 10 stories high. On the other extreme, IMAX executives have peered into a crystal ball that foresees a time when 3-D images can be delivered digitally to homes via direct-broadcast-satellite transmission.
