SHORT TAKES : Out of This World Film Shows Blue Planet Earth Is Fragile

The film is called “Blue Planet,” but when it is finished, the colors likely to make the greatest impression on viewers are brown and gray--brown for the barren expanses of erosion visible to a camera 170 miles above earth, and gray for the layer of smoke that blankets the burning Amazon rain forest.

Eight minutes of raw footage of “Blue Planet,” an IMAX work-in-progress scheduled for completion sometime next year, was shown to the news media and about 40 mesmerized elementary school children at the giant-screen IMAX Theater in Exposition Park today.

“It’s called ‘Blue Planet’ but a better name might be ‘Fragile Planet,’ ” said Col. James Buchli, a member of one of two NASA space shuttle crews who have aimed the 90-pound IMAX camera at Earth while in orbit. “From space, you understand how limited (Earth’s) assets are.”

“Blue Planet” is expected to open sometime in 1990 at the Smithsonian Institution’s IMAX theater in Washington before moving to other IMAX theaters in Los Angeles and elsewhere. The finished film will include overhead views of hurricanes Hugo and Jerry, the effects of urbanization along the coast of Florida, rain forest devastation in the Amazon and Madagascar, and dozens of other natural and man-made phenomena.

The most jolting image of Earth brought back from space so far, said NASA spokesman James McCulla, was of the Amazon shrouded in the smoke that is the byproduct of tree-burning done to clear the forests for farmland.