MOVIE
$9 Plus Popcorn
Astronaut home movies in Imax 3-D
When I saw my first Imax feature in the 1970s, the Apollo missions were still symbols of the future. Now Imax is taking the genre to a whole new stratosphere with Space Station, the first 3-D movie ever shot in orbit.
The 45-minute documentary shows what it's been like to live and work on the International Space Station. It's got all the scenes you'd expect: astronauts outside the station building stuff, astronauts inside the shuttle performing nondescript experiments, astronauts going about their daily business in cool zero-g, and, of course, lots of dockings and undockings.
But like the space race itself, the real story here is the technology. Two cameras were built specifically for this project. The first shooter, the size of a file cabinet, was bolted inside the shuttle's cargo bay, where its three-lens turret offered a creative range never before available to the astronauts-cum-filmmakers. It was remotely controlled via laptop and, because the cartridges couldn't be changed in space, it captured only eight minutes of footage per flight. The second camera is the size of a wall safe. It has removable handgrip controls (attached by a 6-foot cord), a small LCD viewfinder, and changeable magazines that hold 1,200 feet of film, or about 2 minutes of action. And since the radiation in space causes film to fog up over time, all of it had to go up and come down with the shuttle - making it a precious commodity.
Both cameras improve upon older 3-D Imax machines. Each shoots left- and right-eye images on a single strip, unlike terrestrial models that use two synchronized mechanisms. This strip allows for a smaller unit, but requires much faster film-feed speed and specialized parts made of beryllium, a superlight metal that is six times stronger than steel.
Space Station is an alternative to the grainy five-second shots featured on most news programs and gives us something we haven't seen before: the story writ large of the most expensive government housing and science project yet, 220 miles above our heads.
Imax: www.imax.com/films/production/space_station.html.
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