September 28, 2023: Sphere “Postcard from Earth”
Courtesy of Meg Meyer/Sphere Entertainment
Following Sphere’s exciting Sept. 29 launch with the U2 residency, filmmaker Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard from Earth became the first film to premiere at the new Las Vegas venue on Friday. As a kind of narrative and documentary, it immerses the viewer in a range of experiences, making them feel, for example, walking alongside elephants on a safari, swimming with sharks beneath the ocean’s surface, or viewing the Earth from a distant planet.
This film also shows the potential of this new canvas for filmmakers. “I’m still processing everything,” the Oscar-nominated director of “Black Swan” tells from Sphere, whose interior is covered in a 160,000-square-foot 16K LED display that spans the peripheral field of vision of the audience and extends far beyond the stage behind their heads. The images are displayed in high resolution, giving a sense of depth and presence, and are accompanied by a powerful new beam-splitting sound system and 4D features such as wind and haptic seats.
“It’s really a different medium because of the immersion of all the images you create and how they translate to the viewer,” says Aronofsky, saying that when planning the film they were reminded of the Lumiere brothers’ “1895.” Short film “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”, known for scaring audiences through the then new medium of motion pictures when they saw a moving train coming towards them. “That somehow influenced the opening of the sphere. … That moment when your expectations of what you see suddenly change.”
As in the early days of cinema, the visual language and tools of filmmaking evolved throughout the film’s production. “We started with nine Red cameras welded together to get the resolution we needed to create an image for Sphere,” recalls Aronofsky, adding that they then built the first prototype of the custom-made 18K Big Sky camera received, which was invented to create content for Kugel. This camera – which most postcards used as a lens – evolved during production as “we also tried to figure out what the language was for shooting 270-degree film and how we could make that happen Audience feels comfortable with their peripheral vision full of images.” ”
The one-hour film is practically a comprehensive trip around the world, which is rounded off with a space story in the familiar film aspect ratio and begins with the arrival of two people on Saturn. Because they are reminiscent of life on Earth, the images open up to take advantage of the full display. Aronofsky’s longtime collaborator, cinematographer Matthew Libatique, filmed the space story using ARRI’s Alexa 65 camera, while Andrew Shulkind, senior vice president of capture and innovation at Sphere Studios, served as DP for Sphere content. In total, they traveled to 26 countries with various cameras, especially Big Sky.
Aronofsky noted that given the large screen and high resolution they could display, the goal was to form frames full of detail around the viewer. “We tried to shoot in a lot of caves because we knew people would look up and see little spiders crawling around at the top of the cave and all other kinds of life,” says the director. One of these animals caused a great response when it jumped towards the audience. “I definitely knew I wanted to shoot macro shots because presenting them to an audience in 18K with this level of detail would be something no one has ever seen before.” To do this, they hired a team of wildlife photographers.
Another hero shot featured giraffes, including one that appears to be leaning towards the audience in the sphere. “The interesting thing is that the front of the Big Sky camera is a large piece of glass. So there are a lot of considerations. So the giraffe actually thinks it’s seeing a giraffe and is very confused, and it kept coming back to check what they were seeing,” Aronofsky says. “We went away and just left the camera outside and operated it from a distance so the animals would feel comfortable near the camera. And that [shot] It was just a happy accident that just happens when you have enough time and work with the best nature photographers in the world.”
The stunning shots also included an elephant walking close to the audience, captured by wildlife photographer Graham Booth (who previously worked on Aronofsky’s One Strange Rock) and Shulkind. “There are a few tricks in there that I don’t want to give away, but the elephant almost stepped on a million-dollar camera,” Aronofsky admits.
The launch of Postcard to the Sphere (at full capacity with standing room only, Sphere can accommodate up to 20,000 spectators, although not all seats are used at Postcard screenings) also involved a tight production schedule involving a great deal of inventiveness, including the development of a complex production and Post-production workflow, new technologies and processes for everything from reviewing work to moving massive amounts of data out of the camera and through post-production. Aronofsky reports that the film contained a whopping half petabyte of data.
Oppenheimer editor Jennifer Lame was hired to edit the film, which was handled by an enthusiastic media composer. A newly developed virtual reality program allowed her to review cuts in what appeared to be Sphere (cuts were also tested in the quarter-sized Big Dome at Sphere Studios in Burbank). Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain provided visual effects for the project.
But Aronofsky, Lame and the team ultimately weren’t able to see the film in the actual Sphere setting until early September, making post-production even more challenging.
Picture Shop colorist Tim Stipan (Aronofsky’s The Whale) scored the film, while the director’s longtime collaborator Craig Hennigan served as supervising sound editor, designer and mixer for the reshoots. “Tim really had to figure out how to time these images. Nobody had ever timed an 18K image before,” says Aronofsky. “The same goes for the sound. Since the image is 270 degrees, you want the tones to be in the right place. But you can’t really mix it on a normal movie screen because you don’t know exactly where the thing is happening. So we sort of took a guess and did our best, and then we went into the Sphere itself and the MSG team there figured out how we could actually use that big screen to actually mix the film.”
For Stipan, the team installed a Baselight color correction system in a room at Sphere so he could work in the actual environment. (Baselight maker Filmlight has written new software to support Sphere content. Hennigan, meanwhile, started by creating a Dolby Atmos mix and worked from there.
Shulkind — who has worked with Sphere for nearly four years and was instrumental in developing the Big Sky camera and workflow for filmmakers — remembers working at the Las Vegas venue in September. They had a few hours each morning to check the editing, color timing and sound, and then worked until midnight each day while U2 rehearsed and the crew put the finishing touches on the venue.
This even included testing and preparing final elements, such as the wind effects coming from the front of the venue. “It takes about 30 seconds for some of the wind to reach you, so we had to wait and see how the wind got to the front and back rows,” he explains. “They put these plastic cups with some tinsel on them so we could track when different areas were being attacked [wind]. … It’s been a tight month.”