Known in the industry for its lavish effects and vibrant animation, nWave Pictures forays onto new ground with SOS Planet, a film with dazzling digital effects produced in partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature – The Netherlands (WWF) and hosted by Walter Cronkite. The film uses digital effects, 3-D and computer-generated character animation in ways never before seen in the large format industry, plunging audiences into the core of some of the most serious environmental crises facing the Earth today. The film draws the audience into three lush environments, with a blend of live action and animation, using computer-animated animals to graphically illustrate the dangers confronting each targeted region.

“I was attracted to this project by the urgent necessity that we get the message out to the people of the world that our environmental quality is fast sinking and endangering our very existence on this planet,” says venerable newsman Walter Cronkite. “We’ve got to do something about that.”

The Face of Trust

Cronkite, who narrates and hosts SOS Planet, agreed to lend his credibility to the project because, as he said in an interview about the film, “I hope that we begin to move rapidly to do something about the problem of environmental quality – to curb pollution, curb overpopulation and to curb the exploitation of our wildlife, our forests, and our oceans. We need to ensure a happy future for the planet and ensure that our children, and our children’s children, have a decent life on this planet.” Filmed against a green screen, Cronkite is digitally composited into a 3-D television set that floats out toward the audience to open several segments of the film. SOS Planet is the first giant screen film Cronkite has narrated since IMAX’s 1985 release The Dream Is Alive, a look at the U.S. space shuttle that became one of the top-grossing large format films of all time.

The Attraction Connection

SOS Planet was born out of the WWF – The Netherlands’ desire to create an innovative project that would bring the Earth’s plight directly to the public in a totally enveloping way. “They approached me a couple of years ago to create a theme park attraction, what we call a 4-D attraction, a 3-D film about ten minutes in length with some physical effects in the theater,” explains Ben Stassen writer/director of SOS Planet. “They wanted to do something special, something where they could immerse the audience in an experience and get their environmental message across in a very different way.” The result is the PandaVision 4-D attraction at the Efteling Theme Park in The Netherlands, which features completely computer-generated environments illustrating three environmental challenges facing the planet.

SOS Planet is a 3-D, large format extension of PandaVision and puts the attraction and its important message into the context of the Information Age. “For many years, the WWF – The Netherlands had been very successful in getting their message out in the media, but they were having a more difficult time in this day and age with the mushrooming of media outlets and the Internet. You might think more outlets would help, but the information becomes so fragmented that when you have complex issues like the conservation of our environment, the future of our planet, you have to think about new ways to raise public awareness,” says Stassen.

SOS Planet follows the construction of the PandaVision attraction and includes the creation of the film, punctuated by additional 4-D effects. “I thought that doing nature conservation issues in a theme park was quite an interesting and innovative approach, and I saw that it had a much more lasting effect on the public,” says Stassen. “I’ve seen very young kids coming out of PandaVision and they really get the core message.

“I wasn’t interested in doing a behind-the-scenes, making-of-the-attraction film, but I felt that the whole process of communicating important issues of our time to the public-at-large was an interesting subject. So we combined the two topics into this large format, 3-D documentary that became SOS Planet,” says Stassen.

The Third Dimension

The film covers three of the most pressing issues in global habitat conservation – the greenhouse effect, marine conservation, and deforestation – and introduces character animation to populate the three computer–generated environments that illustrate the crises. “The 3-D digital characters that we created – polar bears, orangutans, monkeys, a sea turtle, a sea horse, a snake – interact with the audience,” says Charlotte Huggins, producer of the film. “The character interactions with the audience allow the movie-goers to experience the film, not just watch it.”

“The 3-D is really just an extra punch,” Huggins continues. “The film is very strong in 2-D, but the three-dimensional aspect lets the audience get one step closer in feeling totally immersed in the environments depicted on screen.”

Strangely enough, the power of the large screen format can work at cross-purposes with 3-D effects, according to Stassen. “People go to a large format film expecting a larger-than-life experience. The third dimension has completely the opposite effect. The third dimension reduces the size of the screen, but it gives the experience an intimacy that I really like. We’re trying to transport the audience into the core of the issue, and 3-D enables you to do that like no other format in the world.

Proponents of the 3-D effect claim it eliminates the “window effect” so audiences don’t feel as though they are looking at an image within a frame. “They are transported completely within the cinematic space itself and that’s really a fantastic tool,” says Stassen.

Gigantic Appeal

The filmmakers and WWF - The Netherlands worked together to select topics with the broad audience and scheduling demands of large format theaters in mind. “We decided that we had to focus on issues that were globally known, visually appealing – something that would translate well to the big screen – and be readily understandable,” says Stassen. The result is a film designed to appeal on different levels to both adults and children, using the digital effects to deliver a serious message in a playful and entertaining way.

Breaking New Ground

“The most important difference between this and other large format films, is the animal characters that we’ve created,” says Huggins. In fact, 3-D character animation has never been done to this degree in large format before, according to Stassen, “and it’s certainly not been done with the new digital technologies.

“This is the fourth large format 3-D film we’ve made; in fact, one of the greatest challenges in making these films is that there are so few references. There have only been about 20 large format 3-D films ever made, so how do you know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work? Nearly everything we try is new and that’s very challenging in and of itself,” he says.

On the Face of It

One of the more interesting challenges was settling on a basic treatment of the character animation. “There was a lot of ambivalence on the scientific end of the WWF – The Netherlands to our suggestion of animating the characters’ faces,” says Stassen. “I wanted to create hyper-realistic environments and create characters that had very realistic bodies but with more animated faces. Anthropomorphization is a tricky issue because it’s a thin line between being corny and having something that works.” But Stassen believed that accurately drawn animals in a realistic looking environment would set up an expectation that the animals behave like real animals. “The characters are doing all kinds of things that animals don’t do, so you have to find a way to convey the message and still be believable,” says Stassen.

Ironically, Stassen was advocating much more labor for his production team, because creating faces is complicated work for animators. “It would be much easier to just copy a realistic photo, but I thought it was necessary to create likable characters and to do that, I thought their faces needed to be more expressive,” Stassen explains. The 35-member nWave animation team spent nearly 12 months to create the 40-minute film, which is a fairly short period of time for the amount and degree of animation in SOS Planet.

“The technical side of creating this film was very burdensome,” admits Stassen. “The resolution issues and the 3-D issues are very different for animators, so it’s very taxing on them. If we were working with animators who had never done large format 3-D, we would need twice the time and probably four times the number of animators to achieve the same results. I’ve had this team for about ten years, and experience is absolutely key.”

Entertaining with a Purpose

“nWave traditionally has made more entertaining movies for the commercial market. SOS Planet is an entertaining movie with a serious topic,” says Huggins. “The message is presented in an engaging way that we hope children and their parents, adults and schoolteachers will enjoy. But underneath the fun is an important message. And the message is that we need to be respectful of our planet and take responsibility for it.” The film is expected to run in museums and science centers, as well as commercial venues, and be used in school curriculums. The educational component includes a teacher’s guide for grades 3 through 10, which will be available through the theaters exhibiting SOS Planet. The guides include classroom exercises that emphasize the three areas of global conservation covered in the film: global warming, rain forest deforestation and depletion of the oceans.

“I’m hoping that the audiences leaving the IMAX theaters will wish to enlist with the environmental organizations that are working night and day to save our planet from extinction,” says Cronkite. “I’m hoping that people will at least understand and support those organizations and those who are working for improvement of the environment and its protection for the future.”

The nWave Difference

Using their entertainment expertise in a serious film is an exciting new adventure say the SOS Planet filmmakers. “We’ve always been seen in the large format industry as kind of rebels, because our films don’t fit the traditional mode,” Stassen says. “For me it was really fun to discover that I could also enjoy doing a film that answers more to the mission statement of most large format theaters.”

But taking the more traditional approach has its own filmmaking challenges as well. “Doing a movie where the message is so important puts a burden on the overall production,” concedes Huggins. “Because we have to communicate this well. We have a responsibility to get the information correct, the science has to be correct, the environments we create have to be correct.”

“Our goal is that the audience will come away from this movie wanting to learn more about the three habitats and the three environmental crises. Instead of hearing about these problems as something that happens somewhere else, we hope audiences go away with the idea that there is something they can do as individuals to reverse the tide. It’s hard for people to understand that something that happens in the Borneo rain forest might effect them personally, but it does. All these things are connected and we’re all connected. And that’s what SOS Planet is about.”