Documenting our planet, from fossils to the future

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

By Teresa Griswold

JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING - Imagine movies so brilliant, vivid and captivating that monsters, snakes and spiders jump off the screen and into your lap. Created with ultra-high-resolution 3D, movies shown at last week’s Wildlife Film Festival sometimes required eyewear and a special screen.

They carried audiences into the Late Cretaceous inland sea, ancient rain forests and modern ocean depths.

The 3D films, including National Geographic’s “Sea Monsters” and Imax films “Bugs” and “Deep Sea 3D,” were so photo-realistic, they forced this reporter to cover her eyes. But natural history films weren’t always so dazzling and lifelike.
When Disney’s documentary “The Living Desert” premiered in 1953, natural history movies were sharp and entertaining, but delivered more science than pizzazz. They set a standard that has only grown leaps and bounds ever since.

Many filmmakers who attended the festival credit the Wonderful World of Disney, which they watched as children, as the inspiration that led to their calling. This year’s festival honored Roy Disney and the Disney family legacy with a retrospective that highlighted their rich offering of films.

Roy Disney, a pioneer in the nature film genre with this father and uncle, was on-hand for two events. He described the endless patience it took to painstakingly stitch time-lapse photography, motion pictures, and animal behavior into feature films. Disney’s “The Living Desert” was the first documentary recognized with an Oscar.
Disney said these films were enormously important in generating the views and attitudes we have today regarding animals and nature. This is where it all began more than 50 years ago, when Disney paved a path for the fantastic array of films to follow.
Edward O. Wilson, esteemed as one of the world’s most foremost scientists, delivered two nights of questions and answers at the film festival following the world premiere screening of Windfall Films’ “The Naturalist,” a biopic about his life’s work in science and conservation.

Responding with eloquence and thoughtfulness, this Harvard professor charmed the audience with sincerity, intelligence, and a touch of humor. When asked how he would define the species “homo sapiens,” he answered from an ecological perspective: “They are world dominant, overbearing, and dangerous.”

Today, technology has finally caught up to make one of Wilson’s long-held dreams a reality: an Internet encyclopedia that is immediately accessible to any person, any time, anywhere. The crowd welcomed his newest concept, the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org), an “all-inclusive, single-access way to find out everything we know about life on earth [that] includes all the 1.8 millions of species.”

He explained the Encyclopedia of Life will differ from Wikipedia, because it will be governed by a board of editors and the information offered will be held up to rigorous standards of review. He pegged it a “biological moonshot” with a goal. It launched May 5th and is expected to offer authenticated species pages by the middle of 2008.

A National Geographic photographer presented his latest adventure, which uses another technological innovation for documenting our planet – specially engineered cameras that are able to survive more than two years in the field, withstanding winds up to 170 mph and temperatures as low as minus 40 Fahrenheit.

At a lecture for last week’s Digital Photography at the Summit in the National Museum of Wildlife Art, James Balog showcased the dramatic ice melts he observed while on assignment to create photo-essays about fast-changing glacial landscapes. The rapid retreat of glaciers startled him so much that he created the Extreme Ice Survey (www.extremeicesurvey.org), a two-year process of documenting glacial change in time-lapse photography and video.

The survey uses 26 cameras situated in Greenland, Alaska, the northwestern U.S., Iceland and the Alps. Each camera will generate 4,000 images a year that will then undergo hours of post-production editing to produce compelling video.

Why are these filmmakers, scientists, and photographers so passionate about documenting our planet? You’ll know after you’ve been transported into their world through these high-tech innovations.
PERMALINK:
Documenting our planet, from fossils to the future | Planet JH News Article: Movie Reviews

Leave a Comment