A Beautiful Planet - The American Society of Cinematographers

Time and
Space
James Neihouse, ASC and
a team of astronauts offer
a unique view of Earth — and
humanity’s impact on it —
in the Imax feature
A Beautiful Planet.
By Jay Holben
•|•
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June 2016
American Cinematographer
Photos by Marsha Ivins and Bill Ingalls, courtesy of NASA and Imax Corp.
I
n 1990, Imax released Blue Planet, a
pioneering film that offered an astronaut’s view of Earth as seen from
space. Directed by Ben Burtt, that
film “came about from seeing all the
great shots of Earth that came from the
first Imax space film, The Dream is Alive,
which was Imax’s first movie that was
actually shot in space,” recalls director of
photography James Neihouse, ASC.
Neihouse shared cinematography duties
on Blue Planet with David Douglas, and
he’s been involved in each of Imax’s
space-bound projects since The Dream
Is Alive — including the latest, A
Beautiful Planet, which reteamed him
with filmmaker Toni Myers.
Myers had written Blue Planet,
went on to direct Hubble 3D — on
which Neihouse again served as
cinematographer (AC April ’10) — and
directed A Beautiful Planet. Neihouse
recalls, “When Leonardo DiCaprio came
in to record his voice-over for Hubble 3D,
he told Toni Myers that he had loved Blue
Planet and that we should make another
film like that today. We decided it was
time to have another look at the Earth
from space. What impact would we see a
quarter of a century [after Blue Planet],
with seven billion people on the planet?”
Astronauts
aboard
the
International Space Station (ISS)
Opposite: Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), astronauts capture images of Earth,
creating a heightened awareness of the planet and humanity’s impact on it in the feature A
Beautiful Planet. This page, top: NASA Commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore captures footage
while on a spacewalk to repair the exterior of the ISS. Bottom, from left: Cinematographer James
Neihouse, ASC; writer/director Toni Myers; and Wilmore during an Imax camera-training session.
captured the views presented in A
Beautiful Planet. Neihouse enthuses, “In
the night shots, you can tell where the
human populations are from the city
lights. The whole ‘boot’ of Italy is one solid
band of lights; you can see a ribbon of light
down the Nile, through the darkness of
Northern Africa. You can see North and
South Korea — Seoul is very heavily lit,
one of the brightest [places] in the world,
and the north side of the border is just
www.theasc.com
totally black apart from [Pyongyang].
The oppression of North Korea is
painfully apparent from space. The same
thing with the border between Pakistan
and India — you can see where it falls
from space.
“We look at the Chesapeake Bay,”
he continues, “which was so polluted in
the Seventies that no one would eat
anything from it, but now it’s one of our
success stories; today the bay is thriving.
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Time and Space
Top: A view of
California’s coast
and Central Valley
from the ISS.
Bottom, left:
Neihouse trains
NASA astronaut
Scott Kelly at the
Space Station
Mockup and
Training Facility
(SSMTF) at NASA’s
Johnson Space
Center in Houston.
Bottom, right:
European Space
Agency astronaut
Samantha
Cristoforetti and
NASA astronaut
Terry Virts during a
camera-training
session at SSMTF.
We talk about the California drought.
We have great shots of the West Coast
and Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and
we talk about the water situation there.
That’s the kind of film A Beautiful Planet
is.”
Although he photographs the
requisite terrestrial footage for these Imax
films, Neihouse has never been in space,
and his primary responsibility as director
of photography is to properly train the
astronauts to serve as proxy
cinematographers capable of shooting
the footage themselves. “I have trained all
the crews on the Imax space movies since
1988,” he explains — and with a laugh,
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June 2016
he adds, “I tell everybody that I’m the
only [cinematographer] who has to train
his first unit how to shoot.
“We had three different astronaut
crews on this film,” he continues. “Barry
‘Butch’ Wilmore [ISS Expeditions 41
and 42], Terry Virts [42 and 43], and
Kjell Lindgren [44 and 45] were the
primary shooters. Additional crew were
Samantha Cristoforetti [42 and 43],
Kimiya Yui [44 and 45], and Scott Kelly
[44 and 45].”
The time Neihouse had to train
the astronauts was extremely limited.
With Wilmore, Neihouse was given a
scant eight hours to teach him the
American Cinematographer
fundamentals of Imax photography and
the functions of the camera so that the
astronaut could operate reasonably well
and make lens, exposure and composition
decisions. “Eight hours was crazy,”
Neihouse admits. “Butch really put a lot
of extra effort into getting up to speed on
our cameras.
“[Shooting] with digital really
helps,” the cinematographer continues.
“[The astronauts] would get feedback
right away, and they could download
proxies for us to see what they were
shooting. When they needed help, they’d
reach out about what exposure or focal
length I’d suggest for this or that situation.
Top: A view of
Canada’s
northeast, the
United States
and beyond as
seen from the
ISS. Bottom, left:
Onboard the ISS,
Wilmore
prepares for a
shoot. Bottom,
right: Wilmore
enjoys zero
gravity.
That was often done via email, but I’d
sometimes get a phone call. I have to say,
it’s fun to get a call when the caller ID
comes up as ‘International Space
Station.’”
With the retirement of NASA’s
Space Shuttle program in 2011,
transportation to and from the ISS
became extremely limited, impacting the
choice of shooting format for A Beautiful
Planet. “The Space Shuttle was a ‘space
truck,’” says Neihouse. “It would ferry
things back and forth as needed, but it’s
not flying anymore. Now, you can get
things up to the Station — you just can’t
get stuff back [on a regular schedule].
That was one of the key reasons we went
digital.
“Digital gave us other advantages,
too,” Neihouse continues. “When we
were shooting film, three minutes’ worth
of [15-perf 65mm Imax] film weighed 10
pounds — that’s a lot of volume to bring
back. When we went digital, we were
bringing back Codex data packs the size
of a cell phone with 30 minutes of
footage. We also increased our low-light
capture substantially; we never would
have gotten some of the shots [in A
Beautiful Planet] with film. We were able
to shoot clean audio without hearing the
roaring sound of the camera — which
sounded like a pissed-off sewing
machine on steroids permeating every
shot — so we can actually use audio from
the astronauts and get real moments.
And we were able to shoot a lot more
footage, especially inside the Station, and
capture some really wonderful, candid,
interpersonal moments that we never
could have imagined getting with film.”
The cinematographer tested
several digital cameras for A Beautiful
Planet, beginning with a Red Epic
Mysterium-X,
Vision
Research
Phantom 65, Sony F65, Arri Alexa M
www.theasc.com
and Canon Cinema EOS C300. “We
shot side-by-side tests against [15-perf
65mm] Imax, then compared each
camera,” Neihouse explains. “We went
away from the F65 because of the size,
power consumption and complex menu
selections. Although these astronauts are
geniuses, they can get ‘space brain’ and
become unable to perform relatively
simple tasks because they have so much
to focus on every day — they just get
overloaded. So we try to keep things as
simple in orbit as possible. We also want
to keep it simple so that it doesn’t take
much time for them to execute the shots.
“The Phantom 65 had the same
issue — it was just too complex and
menu-intensive,” Neihouse continues.
“We rejected the Alexa M because, at the
time, it was a two-piece system with a
cable from the camera down to the
recorder. Power was another issue — the
camera is power-hungry. That left us with
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Time and Space
Red and Canon. When we were looking
at the test footage side-by-side in an Imax
theater with digital laser projection, people
were picking out the C300 as the bestlooking of the bunch. An additional factor
was that [NASA was] already using
Canon cameras on the Space Station,
which meant that the batteries were
already certified for space. Everything we
send up needs to be tested and certified —
we can’t have anything outgassing some
unknown chemical into the air. Since the
Canon battery system was already
certified, we saved a lot of money in
certification costs.
“Before we started actually
shooting, Canon came out with the
[Cinema EOS] C500,” he adds. “We were
all completely impressed with the image. I
became a real believer in the need to shoot
uncompressed images, and the C500
offers a 4K uncompressed option that was
significantly superior to the other
contender.” Neihouse and Myers therefore
opted to work primarily with C500
cameras, capturing raw 4K files to a Codex
Onboard S Plus recorder. “We flew three
C500s total,” Neihouse notes, “but they
were only used one at a time. The camera
bodies were switched when the sensors
became too badly damaged from
radiation.”
Additionally, they incorporated
Canon EOS-1D C cameras to shoot the
Earth in sequential still frames — at about
four frames per second. “We flew three 1D
Cs,” Neihouse says, “but only two made it
to orbit, as one was lost when SpaceX 7
failed.” As with the C500s, the crew shot
with one camera at a time, with the camera
bodies being switched out “when the
sensors showed considerable pixel
damage,” Neihouse explains. “The first
camera shot over 149,000 frames, and the
second more than 101,000 frames during
the production.” The raw CR2 files from
the 1D C were then processed in post in
order to interpolate between the frames
and create full-motion 24-fps footage.
“We used the full sensor, 5208x3477
[effective pixels], which is a 1.5:1 aspect
ratio,” explains Neihouse. “That’s pretty
close to the 1.44:1 Imax aspect ratio, so we
lost less information that way. Plus, using
Top: Astronaut
Kimiya Yui of the
Japan Aerospace
Exploration
Agency strikes a
Superman pose
while floating
through the ISS.
Middle: Wilmore
poses with the
camera. Bottom:
Virts preps for
shooting.
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Time and Space
Top: The Cupola is
a panoramic
observation
platform on the
ISS, from which
outside operations
and Earth can be
seen. Middle:
Wilmore preps the
camera. Bottom:
Virts prepares to
shoot through the
Cupola windows.
the camera in still mode enabled us to do
some longer exposure times for our night
passes of the Earth.
“At night, if there’s no moon, then
you can only see the lights from Earth,”
Neihouse continues. “With a full moon,
you can see the ground and get some
really amazing images. We were shooting
as high as 10,000 ISO on the 1D C with
a [Canon 24mm (T1.5) CN-E Cine
Prime, which was the primary lens for
night work] — shooting anywhere from
1⁄10 of a second to 1⁄2 of a second
exposures. There’s a shot coming over
Florida, flying into the Bahamas, where
you see the reefs in the moonlight. That
was totally unexpected.”
The cinematographer says that any
resulting trailing artifacts were still
acceptable even when the 1D C was set
for as slow as a 1⁄2-second exposure.
“Although the ISS is orbiting at 17,500
miles per hour and the Earth itself is
rotating at about 1,000 miles an hour, at
about 250 miles away from the Earth, the
amount of trailing blur you see at those
slow exposures is really minimal,” he
explains. “We didn’t use any tracking or
motion mounts like an Earth-bound
astro-photographer
would
use.
Everything was hard-mounted to the
Station.”
Neihouse paired the 1D Cs with
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Time and Space
Top: The Strait of Gibraltar, Spain, the Mediterranean Sea and North Africa captured from the ISS.
Middle: NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren aims the camera over an empty space suit. Bottom:
Cristoforetti takes her first look at Earth upon arrival in the Russian Service Module of the ISS.
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14mm (T3.1) and 24mm (T1.5) Canon
CN-E lenses. “The 24mm Canon was
pretty close to our typical Imax 40mm
standard wide lens, and I liked that one a
lot,” he notes. Neihouse also employed a
Nikon adapter in order to take advantage
of the complement of Nikon lenses that
were already aboard the ISS. “They have a
ton of Nikon lenses up there,” he says. “We
used the 58mm [Noct-Nikkor f1.2] and
the 180mm [Nikkor] f2.8. For the C500
we flew a 12mm [T1.3 Arri/Zeiss] Master
Prime and a lightweight 15.5-47mm
[T2.8] Canon Cine Zoom.”
Without the Space Shuttle,
supplies for the ISS are now sent up on a
variety of launch vehicles, only one of
which, the SpaceX Dragon, returns to
Earth; all the other supply vehicles burn
up on re-entry into the Earth’s
atmosphere. When the supplies arrive, the
astronauts unload them, then pack the
non-return vehicle with trash so it can be
disposed of as the vehicle enters the
atmosphere. “That’s how they get rid of
trash up there,” Neihouse explains. “You
put it in an empty supply capsule and send
it out, and it is totally incinerated in the
atmosphere.” In the case of the Dragon,
he adds, “it is packed with items requiring
return to Earth, and it then re-enters [the
atmosphere] and splashes down off the
coast of California.”
After completion of the film, the
camera equipment was scheduled for
disposal aboard the non-return vehicles.
“The plan was always to burn up the
equipment,” Neihouse notes. “None of it
was to return. The 12mm Master Prime,
the 15.5-47mm Canon Cine Zoom, a 1D
C and C500, and all of our accessories
have already burned up, and we just found
out that the remainder of our equipment
will be disposed of on the next non-return
vehicle. We had hoped to get it back to do
some ‘post-mortem’ on the sensors, but
there is very limited space for returning
equipment and experiments, so anything
that does not absolutely have to be
returned is burned up. It applies to all
payloads, and is also a reason we couldn’t
fly film — there just isn’t enough room to
return it to Earth.”
To capture a first-person perspective
◗
Time and Space
Top: The 25-milewide eye of
Typhoon Maysak.
Middle: The Great
Lakes of North
America beneath
ice and snow.
Bottom:
Thunderheads roll
over Central
Africa.
during space walks, the astronauts wore 4K
GoPro Hero4 Silver cameras on their
helmets. Neihouse notes, “We used that
footage sparingly, but when it’s real close
and in your face, it works fairly well. A
couple of the shots look really good; a
couple are not so good, but good enough to
tell the story. What’s really surprising is that
you hear noise. Because the camera is
connected directly to the astronaut’s
spacesuit and there is atmosphere inside the
space suits, you actually hear bumps and
scrapes. It’s really cool to hear that, and it
really helps draw you into the scene.”
Inside the ISS, additional lighting
was mostly accomplished with portable
work lights. “[The] original-model
Litepanels Brick lights that NASA uses for
work lights were pressed into service,”
Neihouse says. “During the training, I teach
the astronauts three-point lighting and how
to match levels. One of the hardest shots
that they pulled off was a shot of Samantha
Cristoforetti looking out the window
during daylight. To get that shot within the
dynamic range of the C500, we had to
really pump light into the Cupola
[observatory module], but we had to do it
delicately so that it didn’t look fake or feel
like it was lit. They also did a scene at night
with Samantha sleeping that was lit totally
with the screen of her laptop. She has a
beautiful cool blue light on her, and you
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Time and Space
don’t see that it’s the laptop until the
camera comes around.”
All of the footage of Earth was shot
from inside the ISS, looking out through
existing windows. To eliminate any
reflections from inside, Neihouse built
window shrouds — flat cloths with a hole
in the middle for the lens. “One of the
areas that we struggled with was the big
Cupola. There are seven windows in the
‘back porch’ of the Station, and they’re
covered with what NASA calls ‘scratch
planes’ — basically cheap plastic coating.
So there’s this beautiful view with these
incredible quartz optical-glass windows,
and it’s ruined by these 27-cent, scratched
plastic panels, which are also covered in
nose grease and fingerprints from
astronauts ogling Earth over the years. We
came up with a ‘bump shield,’ a clear
plastic replacement for the scratch shield.
We built these little French doors into it
so you could open the doors and shoot
through the perfect window. Those helped
a lot, and NASA liked them so much that
they said, ‘We’re keeping these!’ So that
was our little contribution to the future of
space photography.”
High-energy particles were perhaps
the most significant concern with regard
to the cameras’ performance throughout
the shoot. Without Earth’s atmosphere to
shield them from this “galactic cosmic
radiation,” as Neihouse explains, the
cameras’ sensors would receive high hits
of pixel-killing radiation. “The higher you
get, the more radiation damage you start
picking up,” he notes. “You can’t really
shield against it. NASA has tested several
ways to shield film and then digital
cameras from this damage, [but] none
have proven very effective.”
Instead, he explains, “When they
weren’t shooting, [the astronauts] would
pack water bags around the equipment.
The water — like water vapor in our
atmosphere — shields against the highenergy particle radiation; it really slows it
down. In the end, we had to do a lot of
post work to clean up dead pixels, but
other than losing pixels, we had no
technical issues at all, which is
astounding.”
The dead pixels also prompted
Top: A view from
Wilmore’s helmet
as he looks down
at Earth. Middle:
Earth’s aurora in
action. Bottom:
The deforestation
of Madagascar as
seen from the
ISS.
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June 2016
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Neihouse to direct the astronauts away
from pushing the ISO on the C500s.
“When you crank up the ISO, you really
start to expose dead pixels,” the
cinematographer explains. “We did do
some low-light shooting with [the C500]
inside the Space Station where the
astronauts [conduct] a lettuce-growing
experiment. It was actually under a
pinkish-fuchsia light, and they bumped up
the ISO [to 10,000] to shoot in there.
Unfortunately, we had to do a lot of deadpixel cleanup on those shots. Otherwise,
about the most we pushed the C500s was
up to 1,600 ISO.”
Although the production focuses
on the planet from space, there are three
terrestrial shots in the movie, including a
piece of vintage footage that was actually
the opening shot of 1971’s North of
Superior, which was “probably the very first
aerial shot that was ever done for an Imax
movie,” Neihouse explains. “It’s a shot of
Lake Superior, flying low. [In A Beautiful
Planet, as] the shot continues up into the
hills, it becomes a CGI shot, and the
world transforms to the landscape of
Mars.”
The cinematographer goes on to
detail a new shot he personally
photographed: “We did a shot of the sun
with the Space Station flying in front of
it. It was a real-time shot, and it required
our being in a very specific spot on Earth,
within a very narrow 5-kilometer band at
a specific time, in order to get the perfect
positioning of the Space Station as it
crossed between us and the sun. We
started by Big Bear Lake [in California]
and ended up in Idaho over four days of
leapfrogging. I wanted to get up as high in
the mountains as we could to avoid the
thicker part of the atmosphere and get a
clearer image; we also had to time it so
that we could shoot it right about high
noon, when the Station would be closest
to the camera. The Station’s crossing of the
sun only lasts .53 seconds, so we shot it
with a Phantom Flex4K at 1,000 fps, with
a [Canon EF 800mm f5.6 L IS USM]
and a 2x extender on it. [That frame rate]
turns .53 seconds into 18 seconds on
screen, and we captured a perfect
silhouette of the ISS passing in front of the
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Time and Space
Cristoforetti
photographs
Earth from the
Cupola.
sun, with sunspots flying around and
everything.”
The cameras for A Beautiful Planet
were launched up to the ISS on Sept. 21,
2014, on a SpaceX Dragon unmanned
cargo spacecraft. Codex drives from the
C500 were returned to Earth on the
SpaceX Dragon vehicles, and then reflown to the station on the next Dragon
launch. However, when a Dragon vehicle
70
exploded after launch during mission
CRS-7 in June of 2015, the production
lost its primary source of transport
between Earth and the ISS. “When they
lost their vehicle, we couldn’t get any more
data packs back,” recalls Neihouse. “They
were all stuck in orbit.
“We had always intended to fly the
data packs back with the SpaceX
missions, and this threw us for a loop,” he
continues. “Marsha Ivins, our spaceoperations guru — and five-time shuttle
astronaut — worked with Codex and
NASA to develop the protocol for remoteaccessing the 4K footage. Getting it off of
the recorder was like a second per frame; it
just wasn’t made to do this.”
“The crew connected the Codex
recorder to an onboard laptop,” Ivins
explains, “and the ground — through the
ISS space-to-ground data link — was able
to transfer the full-resolution Codex data
from the Codex drive to the laptop hard
drive. Then that data was downlinked on
the same path that all onboard imagery gets
to the ground. Once on the ground, the
Imax data was then ported to Imax directly
on a secure server. The transfer rate from
Codex to laptop was 1⁄2GB per minute.
We were limited by the amount the laptop
hard drive could hold, so when we filled the
hard drive, we had to stop — and that had
to be downlinked, the drive wiped, and [we
would] start again. So it took us something
like six weeks to get 1.4TB of data to the
ground. And not one byte was lost!”
Photography wrapped in midDecember, 2015. The final color grade
was performed by Brett Trider with
Autodesk Lustre at Technicolor
Toronto. “Final DCP was 4K, as was the
color-grading resolution,” Neihouse
says. The cinematographer further notes
that because the C500 was generally
used for interiors and the 1D C
primarily for Earth shots — and that the
GoPros and Phantom were used in such
different kinds of environments — there
were no substantial issues with matching
the footage between cameras.
The film also underwent a
stereoscopic post-conversion performed
by Legend3D. “Hugh Murray was our
stereographer, and he supervised the
conversion process,” Neihouse says. “I sat
in on some of the depth-approval
screenings. I was very impressed with the
job Legend3D did with the conversions,
and even more impressive was the
excitement they had for the project.
They were really wonderful.”
In comparing the conversion
process to shooting in native 3D,
Neihouse notes, “I’m a fan of shooting
3D natively, but that really was not an
option for this project. The amount of
data would have been overwhelming; if
it had been in native 3D, [the existing]
number would have doubled. There were
other reasons that led us to shoot 2D and
post-convert, such as not wanting to fly a
3D rig and having to deal with the
challenges that brings to the table.
“It’s hard to believe that I’m saying
this, because I’m an old film guy,”
Neihouse continues, “but I was amazed
seeing the results of the C500 footage
through Imax’s new xenon laser dualprojector system on a full Imax screen.
The way the stuff looks on the laser
system really does rival [15-perf ] 70mm
film — especially Imax 15/70 original
film that goes through a DI process with
a filmout at 5.6K.”
Reflecting on the journey to bring
A Beautiful Planet to the screen, Neihouse
offers, “It’s been a very fun project to do,
and the crew was just incredible. The film
compares living on the planet to living on
the Space Station. We have all these
things that we just take for granted —
water, air — but when those things are
limited like they are on the space station,
everyone has to do [his or her] part to
conserve. The people on Earth need to
be treating each other like crewmates,
respecting our needs and taking care of
our resources. There’s no free ride.” ●
TECHNICAL SPECS
1.44:1
Digital Capture
Canon Cinema EOS C500,
EOS-1D C; GoPro Hero4 Silver;
Vision Research Phantom Flex4K
Canon EF, Nikon Nikkor,
Arri/Zeiss Master Prime
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