Colors of the ‘Blue Planet’ From Space Are Brown, Gray

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, 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 IMAX Theater in Exposition Park on Wednesday. On the giant screen were images of stark beauty and of jolting starkness, a teaser for a film that is designed to demonstrate the wonders of nature and our neglect of it.

“It’s called ‘Blue Planet’ but a better name might be ‘Fragile Planet,’ ” said Col. James Buchli, a member of one of two shuttle flight 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 the second orbital IMAX film. The first, “The Dream Is Still Alive,” has been showing in large-screen IMAX theaters for nearly five years, reportedly before more than 23 million people. But where that 37-minute film was designed to bring viewers aboard a shuttle and give them a taste of an adventure so far shared by about 200 working space travelers, “Blue Planet” will give us an astronaut’s view of the Earth and the environment surrounding it.

Graeme Ferguson, who heads IMAX Systems Corp. and is serving as producer of “Blue Planet,” said final footage for the movie will be completed during the 10-day flight scheduled for late December. The movie is being sponsored by the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in conjunction with NASA and by the Lockheed Corp.

“Blue Planet,” which will open sometime in 1990 at the Smithsonian’s IMAX theater, will include overhead views of Hurricanes Hugo and Jerry, the changes being made in the Gulf of Mexico by the growing Mississippi Delta, the effects of urbanization along the coast of Florida, rain forest devastation in the Amazon and in Madagascar, and dozens of other natural and man-made phenomena.