Astronauts Capture New Images Of Earth For IMAX Film

Astronauts often talk about the first moment seeing earth from space with seeing a blue sphere that seems so fragile. In the new IMAX documentary, a beautiful planet, we get to see a first-hand as astronauts film their daily lives and the earth beneath them. Italian astronaut describes that experience. I could not resist taking a peek. I could see the earth majestically flowing by. It was like a River. I don't know what happened. I was definitely happy at that time. The film is now playing in Balboa Park. Maureen Cavanaugh spoke with a beautiful planet director Toni Myers. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much. I am very pleased to be here. We just heard Samantha Cristoferetti talk about seeing the earth for the first time. Is this a universal reaction from astronauts? Pretty much in all that I've heard. There is the excitement that they go through for all of their training and preparing for launch. Launch is a very violent thing. Then there is a release when they come into zero gravity for the first time and almost everyone has to float right up to the window and look outside. This is the first IMAX movie in space that used digital cameras. What did that allowed you to do and us to see? The digital cameras we were told we had to go digital because without the shuttle we cannot fly our 70 mm film back and forth in a timely fashion. We word because we had never worked in digital before. What those cameras turned out to allow us to do because of their dynamic capture range was film something we had never been able to see before, which is the earth at night. That is a whole of their world that you see at night. It encompasses not only the cities that you can see and the way humans have populated the earth but also beautiful things like the night sky and Aurora. Most of the footage is shot by the astronauts themselves. How did you train them to become documentarians? Our space unit was founded by Greg Ferguson who is the coinventor and cofounder of IMAX. He founded the space unit and developed a syllabus for training astronauts right back in 1984 when we made our first film, the dream is alive. It has evolved since then. We train each crew about 26 to 30 hours. They are pretty proficient at pushing buttons on cameras. They are technically excellent and very smart. We train them in terms of the nuances of making a movie and how to direct their fellow crew members. How to frame things and what the rules are for 3-D. These are 3-D in some theaters. How to record sound and the importance of sound, with people don't realize. Sound is 50% of the experience. We give them all of the tools they need to make their own maybe. We do that in the simulators. The last thing we do in our curriculum is turn them loose with the cameras and the lights and the sound recording. We say go and make a movie now. Direct -- you are in charge of what your fellow crewmates will do in the results. That is the best teaching tool you could ever half. At one point in the view -- film, Tory Burch describes what California looks like from space followed by Jennifer Lawrence. Seeing California is beautiful from space. Looks like a giant ice cream skipper went right down the middle part of the state. It is very Brown and you can tell there is a drought going on and that they can probably use a lot of rain. An effort to save parched crops we use groundwater. So much of in the last 75 years the parts of the Valley has sunk 30 feet. The life of ranchers and farmers depend on what arrived and you can take what water out of which River, even cities like San Diego, Los Angeles, and Phoenix depend completely on their access to water. It is just part of the way that earth can be seen from space. We cannot grasp it here. That was very much part of a film that I wanted to capture. You cannot actually capture a climate change. The result of the are palpable. The crews knew this. We started off with a shopping list of certain places that we wanted to have them look at. Those are not written in stone. We encourage them to be directors and make their own choices as well. We get some wonderful bonus shots on top of that. We saw a lot of pollution. We saw some continuing deforestation and the elements of the California drought. We cannot get up high enough to actually see the breaking up of the Greenland. The station does not fly in an orbit in that inclination. There are some things that we cannot see. The crew did a marvelous job capturing -- captioning those things. You also captured little mundane things that astronauts do, wash their hair, drink coffee. What surprised you about their life on the space station? We had made a film about the building of the space station before. I was a fairly used to seeing the evening food and that kind of thing. Each crew has such an amazingly different personality and different personalities on each crew and different languages spoken that it is always a whole new experience. One of the things about the interior that I really wanted to show people is the parallel between the international space station as a closed loop life support system just like the earth is. The only difference between them is that the earth does not get any supply ships. That is a point that I wanted to show the kids. One of the critics washing this said he never thought he would be as interested watching a man washed his hair as he was watching it in this movie. He does that with dry shampoo. You rub on and it is great to see. While you are watching him do that, it comes from a huge typhoon. On the sound track Samantha describes the recycling process. Their sweat, everything is recycled and use. It is a finite source. That is the point that I wanted to make. This is your seventh documentary about astronauts in space. Why is that topic so endlessly fascinating for you? I should give Graham credit because he's certainly was the main author of the first three films. I don't think there is a big impact -- bigger palette that I know I've except high energy physics or something. It is and less. I guess it is the tendency of people to think of space as all outer space. Within that turn, there are dozens and dozens of exploration routes and themes that you can explore. I can't make 10 films about that. We also explored what the Hubble space telescope saw and is continuing to see, which has changed our whole understanding of the universe. One single instrument has done that. It is and less. I've had a complete education on every single film I have worked for. Thank you for letting me come and speak to you about it. The IMAX film a beautiful planet is now playing.