The Swedish Blue Sky film company and Canadian company Sky High Entertainment used Apple technology for their upcoming, large format film, “Courage,” which is designed to appeal to risk takers — and those who like to watch risk takers in action.
“From the moment we are born, we are risk takers at different levels,” Peter Degerfeldt, co-producer, co-editor and co-camera operator for “Courage,” said in an Apple Hot News article. “That’s what ‘Courage’ is about.”
The idea for a film about risk taking originated in the minds of BASE jumpers (BASE stands for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth — jumping off of fixed objects) Degerfeldt and Göran Widenby, who’ve jumped regularly since 1976, according to the story.
Degerfeldt and Widenby researched the best places to film extreme examples of jumping. They used 13 Macs — including Power Macs and PowerBooks — equipped with software such as Final Cut Pro 2, Avid Composer, After Effects, Storyboard Artist and Photoshop. They teamed up with Sky High Entertainment and Canadian writer Marc Farfard to film, produce and edit “Courage” for IMAX and other large format film distribution mediums.
The “Courage” film crew based their operation on a floating editing station so they could edit onsite. Large-format filmmakers use special cameras to capture footage, though they still take advantage of digital video.
“Since we often can’t see the footage until weeks after the shoot, DV is a blessing,” Degerfeldt told Apple. “We can use a mini CCD camera to look into the film camera’s ground glass and record it out as DV, which is called ‘dv-tap.’ So, after each take, we can monitor the scene on a big screen using a digital projector and know how to proceed next with our filming.”
“Courage” will start playing at IMAX and other large film format theaters around the world in late 2001. The 38-minute film will premiere in Stockholm’s IMAX Cosmonova Dome theatre Nov 1. “Courage” is expected to show up in about 350 other theatres around the world in early 2002.
Besides the use of Mac hardware and software to make “Courage,” Blue Sky, which was formed to merge Degerfeldt and Widenby’s passion for aerial sports with a desire to make “impossible films,” uses QuickTime for its Web page animations. For that matter, so does Sky High Entertainment was started in 1997 by Carl Samson.