It was the actor WC Fields who famously cautioned filmmakers to “never work with animals or children”, but after speaking with Toni Myers, director and editor of the new IMAX space documentary A Beautiful Planet, we’re tempted to update Fields’ advice by adding “or film your movie in space”.
A Beautiful Planet was shot on – and from – the International Space Station, by its crew. And shooting an entire documentary 250 miles above the surface of the earth brought with it more than a couple of challenges that we’re betting even David Attenborough has never had to deal with.
Despite this, A Beautiful Planet ends up having production values every bit as good as any documentary shot safely on the ground.
And it’s hard not to agree that the results ended up being worth the effort. Shots of the Himalayas from almost 245 miles above the summit of Mount Everest are phenomenal in their clarity, and a sequence featuring the Californian coast makes the state’s biggest mountains look as small as ripples of ice cream.
A Beautiful Planet aims to make us take more notice of the damage we as a species are wreaking upon our home. Ironically, it doesn’t do this by making our planet feel huge and majestic, but instead – much like the iconic ‘earthrise’ image shot by the astronauts of Apollo 8 – makes it feel small, and, more importantly, vulnerable.
Radioactive cameras
The final footage may have turned out well, but this was never a guarantee. After all, no one, not even Myers, knew how the cameras would cope with the extreme conditions of space.
For Hubble 3D, a previous film of Myers’, the team sent two Canon G1s up on the same flight for the interior shots. One camera was fine, and was operational for several months without incident, while the footage from the other was riddled with imperfections from the first day.
All the Beautiful Planet team could do was pick their equipment wisely. This meant stress-testing it while still on the ground to see how it would deal with the radiation of space. “We baked them with enough radiation to kill anything in a minute,” Myers says, and then the team picked the devices that held up the best.
Eventually two digital cameras were selected for filming: a Canon 1D C which was used for the exterior shots of the ISS, and a Canon C500 for the interior.
No camera will work perfectly in space, but by carefully selecting their equipment the team could minimise the pixel damage on the chips to an amount that could be reasonably corrected in post-production.
Remote directing
These challenges would be difficult enough to overcome if the director had access to the equipment – but Myers spent the entire time directing proceedings from her home in Northern Ontario, while the crew themselves filmed the majority of the footage hundreds of miles overhead.
Thankfully, a combination of excellent cell phone reception and the wonders of digital film meant the crew could keep in constant communication with Myers over the 15-month filming period.
“We tended to get cell phone calls when they wanted to discuss something,” says Myers. “It was never a malfunction, it was just “What do you think about shooting something like this?” that we hadn’t discussed … so we had that and then … we’d say “Go try it, that would be great”, and then I’d get the shot in a couple of days”.
The footage was transmitted via Jonathan Space Centre to Myers’ home, and would end up in powerpoint presentations covered in what Myers calls “nasty arrows pointing to things I didn’t like” which would then get beamed back to the space station as feedback.
This incremental feedback was an important part of helping the crews, which were made up of scientists and engineers and not filmmakers, to become comfortable with shooting in conditions that would challenge even seasoned camera operators.
VR planning
Occasionally however, a one-time event would take place that the team couldn’t afford to not get right first time. This was when Myers turned to the virtual reality facilities at the Jonathan Space Centre, which enabled her to place a virtual camera on the space station and plan shots with a startling degree of accuracy.
This meant that when such an event occurred, such as the docking of the Russian Soyuz shuttle with the station, the camera settings, angles, and lenses could all be decided weeks in advance, allowing the crew to focus on completing the mission rather than filming.
Analogue troubles
It’s clear that the use of digital cameras played a huge part in making the filming of A Beautiful Planet possible – which makes it all the more remarkable that Myers was able to use real film during the production of Hubble 3D in 2010, and Space Station 3D in 2002.
Hubble 3D saw a whole mile of IMAX film flown up to the Hubble Telescope to document its repair, but all that film was only able to produce eight minutes of footage. It then had to be returned to Earth before anyone could know whether the footage was worthwhile.
In contrast, the crew of the ISS was able to send piecemeal footage to Myers throughout their time with the cameras, simply by transmitting the data to Earth.
Myers is candid about the opportunities digital film opened up to her. “You’ll hear many people protecting film, which is great for artistic applications, [it’s] more nuanced – but boy digital’s great.”
The change in camera technology also allowed for the inclusion of night shots in A Beautiful Planet, which were previously impossible to capture due to the slow speeds of film, and thanks to the advent of digital 4K cameras none of the resolution of IMAX film was lost.
One such shot, of the moonlit coral reefs around the Bahamas, is especially stunning, while another shows Europe lit up at night by thousands of miles of highways. But the most rewarding aspect of going digital has to be that it enables us to see the stars, which when recorded on film disappeared into the blackness of space.
Dual messages
The documentary switches between these epic exterior shots and more intimate interior shots of the crew that man the ISS, and the themes of the movie are similarly two-track.
On the one hand you have an environmental message about the state of the planet, with breathtaking shots of the Himalayas tinged by the knowledge that their ice caps are melting due to climate change.
But the film is also a celebration of the accomplishments of humanity in surviving in space. We see astronauts managing to grow lettuce in zero gravity, and having to overcome massive hurdles to exercise, and avoid their muscles wasting away.
Ultimately these two themes come together to paint an enormously optimistic picture of our planet’s future, with the hope that science and human ingenuity will help us overcome the environmental challenges ahead.
But what’s next for Toni Myers?
“I’m just starting to breath out with the end of the this,” she says. “I’ve been telling people I think I’m going to go home and be a grandmother now.” If Hubble and Space Station are anything to go by, however, she’ll likely have her cameras back in the hands of astronauts before too long.
A Beautiful Planet will be released today in selected cinemas across the UK, and in the US on Sunday. Unfortunately Australian space fans will have to wait until September to catch A Beautiful Planet when it releases there.
Source: techradar.com
