3-D Revolution: The History of Modern Stereoscopic Cinema

Chapter 15: Stereoscopic Outer Space

Space Station in IMAX 3-D At this moment, a space station orbits 220 miles above the earth at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. An unprecedented partnership of sixteen nations , the International Space Station (ISS) is an engineering marvel that will be a permanent laboratory in outer space and the first step of a global effort to go to Mars. Space Station, the first IMAX 3-D film from space, documented the initial construction of the ISS with twenty-five astronaut filmmakers using two revolutionary new large-format cameras. Released in spring 2002, Space Station was produced by IMAX Space Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the IMAX Corporation, and sponsored by Lockheed Martin Corporation, in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Producer Toni Myers and consulting producer Graeme Ferguson had been key members of the IMAX space team, beginning with The Dream Is Alive (1985) and Blue Planet (1990). “Those films were sponsored by Lockheed Martin and the Smithsonian Institute,” said Myers, “and they were done with the cooperation of NASA. Then we got into a new phase where NASA itself commissioned us to cover what was known as ‘Phase One’ with a series of joint flights of the shuttle to Mir.”1 Myers produced the films that resulted from this collaboration with Destiny in Space (1994) and Mission to Mir (1997). “NASA then put out an RFP [request for proposal] for a project to document the Phase Two construction of the space station,” said Myers. Phase Two construction mandated by NASA covered ground launch of the first component from Kazakhstan, Russia, in November 1998 through installation of the crew airlock in July 2001, making the station operationally complete and ready for crew habitation. Stereoscopic Outer Space 15 192 3-D Revolution “I think that one of the ingredients for our success in winning the contract was the 3-D technology,” said Myers. “We were contracted by the Space Act Agreement, which is actually an outgrowth of an act of Congress that charges NASA to disseminate information about its activities as widely as possible. Then we went out and brought in the technology.” Innovative 3-D Cameras To film Space Station, two new innovative large-format 3-D cameras were designed and built for operation in the zero gravity of space by Martin Mueller of MSM Design. Both cameras shoot left and right eye images side by side on a single strip of 65mm Eastman Kodak camera negative film using a 30-perf movement for every two-frame advance. “All the IMAX 3D ground cameras are two-strip cameras just like the projectors,” said Myers. “That’s the big revolution, compressing all of that cinematic engineering into a very tiny space.” Bolted to a side rail just ahead of the main engines in an insulated housing with a quartz window, the cargo bay 3-D camera flew up and down on seven specific missions and captured a bird’s-eye view of space walks and station assembly. Remotely controlled by the crew from inside the space shuttle using a laptop computer, the cargo bay camera was connected to a video feed allowing the astronauts to view a reflex image for one of three different lens pairs with different focal lengths that were mounted on rotating turrets. “Much of the weight in the cargo bay camera is film,” said Mueller. “Fully loaded, it weighs about 155 pounds, and 55 pounds of that is film.”2 The cargo bay camera is loaded with over a mile of film (5,400 feet), which yields about eight minutes of running time. “The in-cabin camera was configured for interior use,” said Mueller, “to be handheld by the astronauts to document life and work in orbit.” A much smaller-capacity magazine holding 1,250 feet of film, yielding almost two minutes of run time, was used for the handheld camera. Matched pairs of different lenses were set in a special tilt-lock mount that also engaged the iris and focus drives. Weighing in fully loaded at ninety-five pounds, the handheld camera has two viewfinding modes with a video screen or regular optical finder. “There was early concern about the effect of zero gravity on the operation of the camera,” said Mueller, “but since the film mechanism accelerates and Stereoscopic Outer Space 193 decelerates so quickly, we felt that gravity would not be missed. It wasn...