American Cinematographer - March 1990 - 40

don't
later

come

on

into the heart until

in the movie.

"The first image of the
inside of the body is of the tra¬

chea, which is something that's

fairly familiar. We did it in a way
that's very softening to the audi¬
ence. From an
image of the
mountain climber scaling a verti¬
cal notch of black rock, there's a

very long dissolve to being inside
the trachea. Sound effects of the
climber breathing have a calming
effect. It's a very mild transition,
and it seems all pretty natural.
"The point is that I never
wanted the audience to start say¬

and that in the blackness around
this image there was still a wall of
the heart, except we hadn't shone

ing 'Oooh, I don't like that,' be¬
cause that
gets in the way of
learning about the subject. So we
don't have any shots of the heart
from the outside
as you'd see
it in open heart surgery. That
kind of image can be excruciat¬
ing," MacGillivray avers.
Capturing the human
body on film from the outside
presented an entirely different set

our

flashlight on it yet. With the
vignetting, you get much
more of a sense of
actually being

of

soft

Freeman Films. The search for
solutions resulted in another

inside the heart rather than look¬

surprising photographic achieve¬

ing at a picture of it," he says.
MacGillivray took care
that the imposing, eight story
images weren't too shocking. Fil¬
ters were used between the lamps
and the fiber optic bundles to
avoid a "deep, blood red" that
could have been unsettling to the
audience. "Some images - for
example, the heart-can be quite
stomach-churning to the uniniti¬

ment:

ated," he states. "There

says. "You also have other char¬
acteristics of the film - the bend¬

-

inside the heart with a flashlight,

Above: Downhill
racer

Maria

Walliser hurtling

pasta gate in the

which
explains the

sequence

cardiovascular

system. Right: Tom
Bowers
the

recreating
experience for

IMAX viewers.

was so

important."

Placement on the frame
of the 29mm circular endoscopic

image was also critical to MacGillivray. Blowing the image up to
full IMAX size resulted in a soft
and undefined image, so exten¬
sive testing was entered into to
determine optimum placement,

image size and edge characteris¬
tics. During these tests, MacGillivray found that giving the circle
a soft,
vignetting edge was more
effective than
IMAX

a

hard circle in the

screen.

"We wanted the audi¬
ence

38

to feel almost as if they were

American

Cinematographer

were

ways to photograph the heart so
that it would be almost gory.
You'd really get the sense of
blood. And then there were ways
that were tasteful. The difference
was

very

were

slight. The images that
script were

written into the

based

on

the fact that I didn't

want the audience to

ever

squeamish. The

that

way

feel

you
introduce the audience to the fact
that they're inside the body is

important. The film does that in
a
very, very cautious and slowdeveloping way. You're not sud¬

denly inside the heart

March 1990

-

you

problems for MacGillivray/

an

IMAX

camera

that is

capable of shooting 110 frames
per second.
"Because you're shoot¬
ing a piece of film with an image
that's 2" high x 2 3/4" wide, and
that image is on a piece of film
stock that is the same thickness as
35mm piece of film stock, you

a

have a certain strength of film
that's a constant," MacGillivray

ing quality of the film, the tearing
quality, et cetera. Because we
preferred to stay with Kodak
stocks, we had strength limita¬
tions. The fastest that large for¬
mat cameras have run is right
around 100 fps. There's a military
camera that was developed that
shoots right around 100, an image
that's approximately 2" x 2", but
it's not steady enough. It's used
for single frame analysis, not
constant

that this

still

projection. I was told
camera
produced the

image that revealed the seal
American Cinematographer - March 1990

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