Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Postcard from Earth’ May Be One of the Greatest Moviegoing Experiences You Will Ever Have
... “We actually were kind of shooting blind because the Sphere itself did not turn on the screen until August,” Aronofsky said. “So we had no idea what this would feel like or look like.” Instead, the director and his team (which included editor Jennifer Lame and cinematographer Matthew Libatique) made do with 4k headsets (“nowhere near the quality that you need to understand what was going on in the shot”) and Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s Big Dome, a fourth the size of the Sphere in Burbank.
But even that couldn’t prepare them for seeing the 18k footage they’d captured across the globe with a camera and lens so powerful that even a speck of dust could mar the shot. Even armed with some knowledge, the filmmakers weren’t prepared for the quirks of such a new camera. A shot involving a helicopter was thought to be an easy fix: remove the blades in post. But the camera’s sensitivity meant that the sunlight passing through the chopper’s blades would make the whole image flicker. ...
[The camera] was literally coming off the assembly line,” Aronofsky said of the filmmaking process. “Often it took 12 people just to turn it on. It was outputting 32 gigs per second. So it has a huge hard drive wired to it. [And] the lens was very unwieldy because it’s a 270-degree lens. So it’s an incredible piece of glass, [but] it’s a very hard piece of machinery to work with. And it became clear that we were going to be limited in how to move the camera to give some type of propulsion. ...
The end result is a 50-minute combination of film and Vegas attraction that takes viewers from the Grand Canyon to close-ups of a praying mantis that no one in the history of the world has ever seen rendered with such clarity. And not just see — a sequence in a Parma, Italy, opera house includes a solo violinist whose performance is rendered in such minute detail, thanks to the immersive sound powered by Holoplot, that one can hear her fingers on the strings. ...
The Sphere Experience with Darren Aronofsky’s “Postcard from Earth” plays several times a day every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Tickets start at $49 — but expect to pay upwards of $89 per ticket.
See the full story here: https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/postcard-from-earth-darren-aronofsky-sphere-film-technology-interview-1234914462/
