Strait Scoop on Magellan : Film: OMNIMAX project by Orange County producer-director highlights explorers and their discoveries.

Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Spain in 1519 with five ships, 241 sailors and a steadfast belief that there was a better way to reach the Far East. Nearly three years later, only one ship and 18 men who survived by eating rats and sawdust had made it back, but Magellan had launched the first sail around the world and found the South American shortcut that came to bear his name.

“No one else really believed the strait was there,” says Greg MacGillivray, producer-director of a new OMNIMAX film about great discoveries and explorers, including Magellan. “The crew on one of his ships turned back and tried to (abort) the entire voyage prior to its discovery.”

MacGillivray recently concluded an expedition of sorts that began last December and stretched from Chatsworth, in the San Fernando Valley, to Chile’s Strait of Magellan and other sites where he shot the giant-size movie. A 15-minute version will premiere in Seville, Spain, at Expo ‘92, which runs from April 20 to Oct. 12, and a 35-minute version will be released internationally at IMAX and OMNIMAX theaters in January, 1993.

Like its sister system IMAX, OMNIMAX movies use a film frame 10 times the size of conventional 35-millimeter film stock and projects it on enormous screens. But OMNIMAX projects its picture not on a flat screen, but on a domed surface, in this case 4 stories high and 82 feet wide, that extends in front, around the sides, above and below the audience so viewers feel as if they’re inside of an eggshell, MacGillivray said.

The movie, tentatively titled “Discovery,” will inaugurate an OMNIMAX theater in one of Spain’s four Expo pavilions, which are among about 110 national pavilions in the worldwide exposition that commemorates the 500th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World with the theme “The Age of Discoveries.” Some 55,000 activities, from boat races to opera, are planned, and 18 million visitors are expected.

The movie is loosely based on the book “The Discoverers: A History of Man’s Search to Know His World and Himself” by Pulitzer Prize-winner Daniel J. Boorstin, MacGillivray said. The full-length version will highlight about a dozen discoveries or discoverers. (Alcatel, the Spanish telephone company, paid $3.2 million for the short version, and MacGillivray Freeman Films paid an additional $2 million to make the longer film).

In addition to Magellan, Sir Isaac Newton will be portrayed, as will Columbus, Arab astronomers who confirmed earlier Greek theories as well as the amateur archeologist and his daughter who found the first example of prehistoric art in Spain’s Altamira caves. Advances in modern-day solar astronomy will be traced in a sequence that includes footage of last July’s solar eclipse, shot from Hawaii’s 13,796-foot-high Mauna Kea peak.

Each subject in the film illuminates a different motive, approach or discoverer’s forte, MacGillivray said in an interview at his spacious ocean-view production office here.

“The point of the Magellan sequence is the idea of tenacity, (the explorer’s attitude that) ‘I am going to spend my life and all my energy and all my money and not concentrate on anything else except achieving this goal,’ ” said MacGillivray, who has made 11 IMAX and OMNIMAX films since he started using the format in 1976. He began producing films nearly 30 years ago, his first ones about surfing, while he was a student at Newport Harbor High School.

Filming the sequence, which starts with Magellan’s departure and ends as his sailors come through the strait to the Pacific, demanded tenacity too, MacGillivray said.

The area around the strait is “exquisitely beautiful,” with huge, statuesque rock formations jutting straight out of the azure sea and countless, massive glaciers, he said. But the wind typically gusts at 40 knots, about the speed of Hurricane Bob once it simmered down to a tropical storm, making it nearly impossible to get steady aerial shots from a 17-seat twin-engine plane.

“You need very, very smooth weather conditions for IMAX because if there’s any kind of jog in the camera, the entire theater moves, so the audience pretty soon is pretty ill,” MacGillivray said with a laugh.

One day, the wind had whipped up to 55 knots by the time the film crew was ready to land. “But landing speed of the aircraft is about 65 knots,” he said, “so finally when the pilot (who was flying into the wind) got his airspeed down low enough to land, we floated straight down like a helicopter--in a plane!”

The gut-wrenching ride was worth it, said MacGillivray, 46, who has filmed a rock climber thousands of feet up, America’s Cup racers and an airplane wing walker. “We were able to get beautiful, crystal clear images and some images of stormy ocean filled with streaked white caps like I’ve never seen before, and I’ve been a sailor and a surfer all my life.”

MacGillivray said he came home with some “exciting” shots of this summer’s eclipse. Having received permission from the University of Hawaii eight months earlier, his three-person crew was one of about eight non-scientific teams allowed to film from atop Mauna Kea, he said.

Totality, when the moon completely blocked the sun, was “absolutely stunning and freaky. It’s just like a light being turned off. You’re standing there and you’re warm, then all of a sudden--Bang!--the lights go out and you start to get cold.”

Visually most remarkable was the corona effect, when brilliantly colored shafts of light from the sun’s outline are all that can be seen behind the moon’s black disc, MacGillivray said. He added, however, that even with a Telephoto lens, the camera can’t do justice to the phenomenon.

“On film, you do see the corona and you see the blues quite well and a beautiful fringing, but you don’t see the pinks and the brief yellows and the color changes quite as nicely.”

For other sequences for the movie, MacGillivray traveled to Switzerland and South America and will be flying to Alaska to film the aurora borealis.

World travel is one reason he loves his job. Exposure to a wide array of ideas and people is another, said the Orange County-bred filmmaker who has produced IMAX movies about the human body, the people of Singapore, and man’s age-old pursuit of velocity.

“I feel so lucky,” he said. “Since the films we do are destined for science museums or other museums, I get to dive into the minds of these experts and for a brief period of time, become somewhat of an expert on the subject myself. It’s really a wonderful way to do things.”