Storms Batter Cirque du Soleil’s Imax Venture

During the four-month production of the new Imax 3-D adventure, “Cirque du Soleil Journey of Man,” the cast and crew were at nature’s mercy, battling rain, snow, wind and nearly freezing water temperatures.

“It was an uninsurable film because we were victim to any weather condition,” says producer-writer Peter Wagg. “We were also locked into the artists’ performance schedules.”

Celebrating human spirit with the artists and music from the enchanting Cirque du Soleil, the 40-minute film follows the stages of human development from birth to maturity with each stage introduced by a Cirque act, including the taiko drummers from “Mystere” in Las Vegas; the graceful synchronized swimmers of “O” in Las Vegas; the bouncing Bungees from “Mystere” and “Saltimbanco”; the Cube Man from “Mystere”; and the Statue Act from the European tour of “Quidam.”

“Journey of Man,” which opens today, was developed by Wagg, the managing director of Cirque du Soleil Images, the audiovisual-multimedia division of the Canadian company.

“It’s my responsibility to attempt to take the magic of a live Cirque du Soleil experience to other mediums,” he says. “The most challenging and ambitious was to take a Cirque du Soleil experience into the immersive world of the Imax large-format 3-D, because that’s as close as you can get to the reality of a live show.”

But Wagg didn’t want to simply film one of Cirque’s eight live shows currently in performance around the globe.

“This [format] allowed us to go into whole new areas and consequently write a visual story line that used all of the wonderful benefits of Imax and fused it with the artistry of Cirque. That’s why we went to all of those spectacular locations [including the Valley of Fire in Nevada, the Redwood forests of California and Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate] and took our artists out of the big top and put them into locations that worked within the story line and reflected those different stages of the journey of man.”

Director Keith Melton added a continuity to the story line and gave it “some sort of an internal logic to what the acts mean. I also had to figure out how to make all of this work from a stage experience to a film experience, and that meant adapting a lot of things along the way.”

Melton used two types of 3-D camera, the primary one being the Imax Solido twin camera, which weighs a whopping 400 pounds when the base of the camera is added. “It’s two cameras put together, and it runs about 3 1/2 minutes worth of film at 24 frames per second,” he says. The other camera used was an Iwerks 70-millimeter 3-D rig.

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Because of the various locations, the production was constantly on the move. “There was a lot of down time in between but, to give you an idea, traditional feature films maybe shoot 20 setups a day, and we were lucky if we got seven setups a day,” says Melton.

The Imax camera takes a “ridiculous” amount of light to get any depth and focus. “It is also a lot more meticulous because you see things pretty much as the eye sees the world,” Melton says. “Everything was carefully designed in terms of color, lighting and color contrasts.”

The synchronized-swimming sequence was shot in the ocean off the Bahamas where the water temperature was nearly freezing at the time. The camera had to be placed in a huge waterproof encasement.

“It literally took a mini-crane to lift it off the boat and into the water and then back out again,” Melton recalls.

“The swimmers could hold their breath when we were shooting these complicated moves for about 30 seconds,” he says.

To make it easier for the swimmers, the sequence was designed as a series of montages. “Fortunately, I was a diver. I had an underwater whistle--one beep would mean the camera would start, the second would mean these very long [air] regulators would be pulled from the mouths of the swimmers who were in position, and as soon as the regulators were clear, the third beep began the performances. We were down there four to five hours a day.”

Equally arduous was the Cube Man sequence, which was shot over several bitterly cold December nights at the Valley of Fire State Park north of Las Vegas. The performer Mikhail, who wears next to nothing, had to endure wind and snow while spinning a cube 65 feet up on one of the rocky cliffs.

“We had these huge cranes to get the cameras up there,” says Melton. “We literally had to gel him down, which sapped the heat from his body.” “

Huge generators were brought in to light the scene, as they also were for the forest sequence. Because the forest was so dry, the art department brought in hundreds of fern plants to brighten the surroundings.

“We literally art directed the forest,” says Melton. “We shot the Bungee sequence next to a parking lot that we covered and dressed.”

The haunting, surreal Statue Act features a couple performing a balancing act on a lily pad. Melton’s location scout found the perfect location at a reflecting pool at an estate called Green Gables in San Mateo in Northern California.

The 60-by-120-foot pond was in bad shape, so all the water had to be drained. “We built this huge structure just underneath the surface and we put our dolly track and our lily pad on a wood block,” notes Melton.

Save for the opening title sequences and a few other scenes, Melton limited the 3-D effects. “Overall, we tried to keep it very performance-based, as Cirque is. . . . It would weaken the power of what they do if we embellished it with too many effects.”