Immersing Into World of Roller Coasters of the Mind

“Keep your hands and feet inside the theater at all times!” That line from “Thrill Ride: The Science of Fun,” an Imax film opening Friday at Edwards 21 Megaplex in Irvine, may elicit laughs, but like a Zen koan, it also yields a golden kernel of truth out of seeming preposterousness: In the case of thrill rides such as Universal Studios’ Back to the Future: The Ride, the rider ideally is immersed in a frame-less experience, where the boundary between spectator and participant is blurred.

“Thrill Ride,” from Sony Pictures Classics, documents the history and making of thrill rides, from roller coasters to a new generation of attractions that combine motion simulators with ride films using computer-generated imagery, or CGI. If a CGI ride film can be described, as it is in “Thrill Ride,” as “a roller coaster of the mind” in which ‘our body comes along for the ride,” the Imax movie, which incorporates 23 minutes of CGI into its 40-minute running time, blurs a few lines itself: It’s a film about thrill-ride films that often feels like a thrill ride itself.

There may be no one better qualified to talk about the future of thrill rides, thrill-ride films and films about thrill-ride films than director Benoit “Ben” Stassen, 38, a USC School of Cinema and Television graduate whose Brussels- and Sherman Oaks-based production company, New Wave International, is a leader in the large-format and simulator ride-film industry.

Stassen spoke at Edwards’ Imax theater in Irvine after a recent preview screening of “Thrill Ride,” his first Imax effort. He’s currently in Honduras filming “Dolphins: The Ride,” a thrill-ride film for Imax RideFilm.

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Question: How in the world did you get started making thrill-ride films?

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Answer: By accident. I had made a feature-length Croatian film, [the Golden Globe-nominated] “My Uncle’s Legacy,” and was about to produce another when all hell broke loose in Croatia. I was coming back from Croatia, and a high-end computer-animation company in Brussels asked me to help bring them into the realm of generating their own productions. I had never before seen a computer-works machine in my life. When I did, I realized that a CGI workstation is a mini-Hollywood studio on a desktop, with fantastic power to do incredible things.

A lot of CGI was already being used in feature films such as “The Abyss.” I thought a thrill-ride film would be the ideal showcase for our capabilities. I produced “The Devil’s Mine Ride,” our first computer-graphics ride film, five years ago. It’s been seen by more than 25 million people around the world. [In the Southland, it’s being shown at Universal CityWalk in Hollywood.] It more than showcased our capabilities.

Q: What is your company’s niche in the ride-film industry today?

A: In [‘Thrill Ride’] are 13 different ride films. [Eight] are ours. We have become the largest ride-film company in the world by far. New Wave has produced more ride films than anybody else.

Q: One of the goals of thrill-ride films is to make people forget they’re looking at film. Suddenly, the Holodeck on “Star Trek” or, alarming or alluring depending on who you talk to, even virtual sex, doesn’t seem such a leap.

A: We call it immersive entertainment rather than virtual entertainment. Between the theory of being able to be immersed completely into an audiovisual experience, and the reality of being able to achieve it, there is a very big gap. There are very few [state-of-the-art thrill-ride] venues around the world, and Back to the Future is the best one.

That venue is a dome. We look at it more as a ride experience than a film experience. From that standpoint, it is immersive because the seats are moving and because you have surround-sound. . . . There are 1,500 [thrill-ride] simulators around the world. Unfortunately, two-thirds of them are not real high-end audio-visually.

With home theaters getting better and better and better, it’s hard to get people to go out of their homes. The Imax large-screen format may be the future of entertainment, and in the not-so-distant future.

Q: Some Imax theaters use 3-D technology, and 3-D would seem particularly well-suited for “Thrill Ride.” Why didn’t you use it?

A: It would have entailed going back and forth between [2-D and 3-D] formats, due to the use of archival footage.

Q: One of the most intriguing ideas in this film is that of a virtual museum of history, where you pick a day or place in history that interests you . . .

A: . . . And you go there. We’re playing, in a visual sense, playing with images. What’s happening with the power of the digital revolution is just simply incredible.

Q: What do you imagine is the timeline for creating such a virtual museum or library--where you simply indicate a time and place and basically find yourself immersed in significant events? A: Ten years? We are already transferring high-resolution images, at around 22 megabytes each frame, via Internet from Belgium to the U.S. The digital data, the computer animation you see in the film, is sent one frame at a time, then rerecorded onto 70-millimeter Imax film in Los Angeles. It takes a long time--one frame every eight minutes. But we are capable of transferring this kind of imagery without loss of quality and resolution.

Q: You went into making this film knowing as much about the field as anybody. Did you discover anything in the process that you personally found fascinating?

A: Absolutely. When you’re talking about a ride film, trying to create a completely immersive entertainment . . . there’s no film experience in the world that comes as close to being a frame-less type of entertainment as the large-screen format. [The Imax screen in Irvine is about 60 feet high, 90 feet wide.] You mentioned the dome at Universal, that’s even better. Then you are completely within the frame. . . . The Imax process would be the ideal way to present a documentary about a thing that is itself immersive.

But if you’ve seen a number of Imax films, they’re very static. Why? Because moving a camera creates a great amount of [visual distortion]. The really biggest challenge was to build this film like a ride film where the camera is always moving. . . . Basically my biggest discovery during this film is that it worked.

Q: The roller-coaster shots were the hardest to pull off?

A: Very much so. . . . First of all we had to select the roller coaster carefully, where there’s not too much lateral movement. We chose several, all based on that premise. Wooden coasters tend to have a lot of right and left turns, which [cause distortion] like crazy. So for the first roller coaster that you see, we used the “Cinerama” footage.

Steel coasters, on the other hand, tend to loop and curve all the time--you turn while you’re going upside down and changing point of reference. We also found out that using fish-eye lens, really fish-eye, where you see almost 180 degrees, helps tremendously.

Q: In a film so focused on technology, is there any scene, from a technical standpoint, of which you’re particularly proud?

A: It’s not such an important scene in the film--the miniature-train sequence. To my knowledge this is the first piece of film in the history of cinema that was recorded with a high-resolution digital camera.

We did not use film to record this scene. We took a still-picture camera and replaced the little film magazine with a computer chip that records images in really high Imax resolution. Unfortunately it takes seven seconds for one frame [to be recorded digitally, compared with the standard rate of 24 frames per second for film], so we could not shoot it in real time. . . . But here, too, it’s only a matter of time . . . before we can take a small camera like this and be able to shoot an Imax film in real time--without using film at all.

* “Thrill Ride: The Science of Fun” opens Friday at Edwards 21 Megaplex, 65 Fortune, Irvine. $5-$7. (714) 832-4629.