Astronauts Play Film Makers for IMAX ‘Blue Planet’

From the blackness of outer space, the camera tilts downward until the rim of the planet Earth comes into view. Then from 180 miles in space Baja California rises onto the screen.

This would be opening sequence of a movie filmed by astronauts aboard the space shuttle Discovery, which was scheduled to land at Edwards Air Force Base this morning.

Besides launching a $100-million communications satellite, the five-member crew has spent part of this week training an IMAX 70-millimeter camera on the earth to document its increasingly threatened environment.

IMAX Systems Corp. claims to produce the largest format film in the world--10 times larger than the 35-millimeter film used in standard Hollywood movies. This week the IMAX camera focused on brush fires in Madagascar, the pollution surrounding Mexico City and damage caused by hurricane Gilbert last September.

This week’s footage, combined with additional earth-bound film, will become “Exploring the Blue Planet,” a 40-minute documentary produced by Graeme Ferguson, a co-inventor of the IMAX film process and head of the Toronto, Canada, firm.

A collaboration between the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the film will follow the successful “The Dream Is Alive.” Shot with an IMAX camera on space flights in 1984, the movie, which was seen at the Mitsubishi IMAX Theater at the Museum of Science and Industry here, showed astronauts rocketing through space.

Now, however, says Brian Duff, who directs special projects for the National Air and Space Museum, “It’s not enough just to take pictures in space. You have to have a theme.”

The theme of “Blue Planet” is the fragility of the earth’s environment. Says Ferguson, whose firm has trained 24 astronauts to use IMAX cameras, “I’ve never met an astronaut who didn’t come back saying what a small earth we inhabit in this void of space. They’re anxious for us to understand that.”

The Smithsonian hopes the movie will be part of a series of instructional space-based films. After “Blue Planet,” scheduled to premiere next spring, the museum is planning an IMAX documentary on deep-space exploration for 1992.

By Hollywood box-office standards, space flicks may not be blockbusters, but, says Duff, “The Dream” brought 30 million viewers worldwide to the 58 theaters where IMAX and its sister OMNIMAX films are projected on giant horizontal or domed screens.

Space filming also has particularities unknown to the run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie. For “Blue Planet,” scientists at the Smithsonian worked with NASA’s Space Shuttle Earth Observations Office, which monitors global weather during flights, to draw up a wish list of some 60 planetary locations along the shuttle’s orbit path. For a shot of a coast line and inland desert on Thursday, there were two possibilities, Southern California and Namibia. The weather was cloudy over California, so the astronauts used Namibia.

The bulky IMAX camera, which is about the size of a typewriter and on earth weighs about 100 pounds, sits in a mount attached to the space shuttle’s window with Velcro bands.

Moving it through the small quarters, even weightless as it is, has become part of the filming lore. Astronauts shooting ‘The Dream’ said “it was like having a big St. Bernard bouncing around the space craft,” Duff reports. “It followed them around.”

The movie-making has also attracted the attention of President George Bush, who asked the astronauts when he spoke to them Thursday, “How’s that IMAX going to be?” and encouraged the orbiting cinematographers.