Harry has seen a bit of IMAX - SPACE STATION in 3D - Wow!

Hey folks, Harry here with an update about the profoundly big screen experience.

No I’m not talking about your 27 inch screen at home, nor am I talking about the projection TV at that local sports bar. I am not even talking about those screens at the local 35 mm theater near you. This time, I’m talking about IMAX. Well technically not just IMAX, but 3D – IMAX!

This past week, Greg Foster, President of Imax Theatrical Entertainment decided to take time out of his busy life to drop by the Bob Bullock Texas History Museum here in Austin, Texas to give myself and the AICN crew a peek at IMAX’s latest creation, SPACE STATION, which is the first 3D film shot actually in Outer Space centered around the construction and inhabitation of the International Space Station.

Now I had never seen any 3D IMAX footage ever. My experience with 3D films begins with Vincent Price’s classic HOUSE OF WAX goes through classics like ROBOT MONSTER and GORILLA AT LARGE to that scrub of a director, Alfred Hitchcock’s DIAL M FOR MURDER. Of course we shouldn’t forget JAWS 3D or TREASURE OF THE FOUR CROWNS, but only because of the painful scars they left on our retinas.

The 3D film has always been a major agony. You tend to get a headache, your neck hurts because you have to keep your head perfectly aligned with the screen, lest the dreaded double ghost image occur. The color never looked particularly great. In all, the promise of the 1950’s advertisements promising 3D as the future of cinematic history… never came to fruition.

Personally my favorite 3D experiences have always had to do with ViewMaster technology.

Until now. Greg Foster showed us around 5 minutes of footage that will be included in the film SPACE STATION this April when it premiere’s at the Smithsonian’s AeroSpace Museum in Washington, D.C. with President Bush in attendance. To call the footage jaw dropping would be to ignore my accelerated pulse, the rush of adrenaline and the upturned corners of my cheeks as I watched the sheer perfection of the IMAX 3D experience of outer space.

I could not believe it. The enormity, the clarity and the thrill of being in a completely weightless environment was exhilarating. I made Greg play it twice, because… well that’s just the sort of immature child I am, and because my eyes didn’t quite believe what I was seeing the first time. Folks, this was cool. The floating thrown woman… that glove, there was this glove that just continued to float closer and closer to me. I could tilt my head a bit and still see everything in perfect clarity. The color was gorgeous. The sense of motion… tangible.

The footage was not assembled into a story, it was just raw footage from one of the 10 missions that Astronauts went on to capture the story with. So I did not hear the new Tom Cruise narration that was recorded about 2 weeks ago, nor did I hear the music that would be laid down. What I heard was the astronauts’ tech-speak identifying what it was that they were doing! IMAX trained the astronauts on a specially constructed Lockheed Martin Space IMAX camera to put together the film. The astronauts got so gung ho about it, that they actually refused to come back to Earth for two extra days, just to capture a shot they wanted to have in the film. A very… Spielbergian shot! HOW COOL IS THAT???

If you love space, not just the fiction that takes place in it, but the real conquering of it. This is a must see. I’ve seen Dave in space, Spock in space, but watching the real thing in this format… you can just feel the difference. While I sit here I know that the space industry will most likely never get it set up where mere mortals like myself will ever be able to ascend in a non-ash form into the realm of space, but this is as close as I can imagine getting. Fantastic thus far. I should be seeing the final film in a month or so. Can’t Wait!

This is where you can see the trailer!!!

This is the SPACE STATION IMAX Website!