Popular lore may equate a picture’s worth to a thousand words. But that equation goes right wonky when the picture is cel animation and when that animation is the first produced for the immense reaches of the Omnimax domed screen.

Nelvana of Toronto, through its subsidiary Bear Spots, pioneered the production of cel animation for Imax/Omnimax when it dedicated more than a year’s production time to the creation of some seven and a half minutes of animation for an Imax presentation which ran for four months at Expo ’93 in Taejon, South Korea.

The animation accounts for about half the run time of the 15-minute film Journey To The Planets, a centrepiece of the Imagination Pavilion at Expo ’93, which ran until last November. The film’s crew, most of whom have yet to see the finished product, will have a chance to see it at a screening in the next few weeks. At press time, Imax was doing English titles for the crew screening, adding, however, that no distribution deal is currently in place for a Canadian public screening.

The Bear Spots team, led by creative director Clive Smith, had to write its own rules to get the job done. Various animators, a producer, technical experts and idea generators had to come up with a new way to draw the drawings, new equipment to shoot them, new approaches to animating different characters within a given frame separately, and spend huge numbers of hours creating, sizing and positioning drawings, then filming and testing them before transferring to cels and and painting them.

Described as ‘a unique blend of technologies and techniques,’ Journey To The Planets is the first Omnimax project to ‘tell a story through animated characters.’ Much more limited animation sequences have been created for such Imax projects as Skyward and Heart Land.

The film vaults forward in time to follow a small group of alien navigators aboard a spaceship on Nov. 22, 2063, in search of a new home. Time is running out for them because before long, their own sun and its planets will die. They have searched hundreds of galaxies looking in vain for a habitable planet. Finally, our own Milky Way is their last chance. We follow the adventures of the six-member scouting party as their search propels them towards Earth.

Two of the most interesting production stories in Journey involve the work done to determine how to create animation for the dome and how to integrate it with computer-generated data from nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

First, Bear Spots’ specialty, the animation. Smith says that since the dome in Sunkyong’s Imagination Pavilion at Taejon is so big, Nelvana essentially had to start from scratch in terms of techniques of animating a character. Strobing, a characteristic ‘rarely addressed by tv or theatrical feature animators, became a major concern and understanding the peculiarities of projecting in the dome was a major requirement for all animators,’ he says.

All assumptions were off from the outset of production. Typically, art for backgrounds for normal commercial or theatrical work is 16′ across; ‘in this case,’ says Smith, ‘it was 40′ across.’

But if it was fine to shoot on 40′-wide paper, it would have been too cumbersome for artists to be drawing on stacks of such paper. Instead, with calculations in hand as to where characters would end up being projected on the dome, and where they could readily be seen by the audience, characters were animated ‘within certain areas of the frame.’

Then the animators went to work. Each drawing was produced oversize, says Smith, to enhance detail, and later reduced to the size of final artwork. Later, according to production notes, the drawings were ‘correctly repositioned within the composition, shot on video and finally on 35mm film to confirm the accuracy before being combined and transferred to cel, either mechanically or photographically, and then hand painted.’

The painting itself was ‘meticulous.’ Smith recounts that some 30 painters laid down over 25 gallons of paint.

Obviously, the painters had to follow strict procedures on thickness and application of paint, color consistency and accuracy. As might be expected given the newness of the whole process, the painters had to add to existing palettes with new colours ‘to allow for a transparent effect of the characters in their environment.’ All in all, the animated sequences include about 500 colors.

The images themselves also merited special attention. With the design concept of the aliens provided by Canadian cartoonist Munro Ferguson and finessed by Frank Nissen, who also designed the spaceship, the animation team had to keep a couple of cardinal rules in mind. First, they could not draw straight lines, corners or angles because these would be distorted on the dome. Second, the art features dark backgrounds to avoid over-illumination of the dome during projection.

Eventually, shooting the cels began. But not before Imax adapted a camera for the job. Bear Spots’ production notes say a ’70mm 15-perforation Imax single frame camera with bi-pack capabilities was installed on a converted Mechanical Concepts animation stand. Bear Spots’ camera operator David Altman directed the adaptation, testing and final shooting of the footage. ‘Testing was the order of the day: testing lenses, testing electronic requirements, testing the Kuper Control System, rigged to accommodate large-size artwork, to operate the camera and testing the programming of brand-new software,’ say the production notes.

‘Sometimes,’ says Smith, ‘it took a week of 24-hour days to shoot, say, an eight-second sequence, requiring several exposures of the film for in-camera special effects.’

All of this work was conducted in a pressurized camera room, specially fitted on Nelvana’s premises to accommodate the ultra-clean requirements for film destined to roll on the dome. The smallest details and imperfections in cels and film are magnified tremendously by the Imax camera. Smith says the animators ‘had to add far more information than normal – and so the animation is very full, very articulate, very detailed. Nearly all the animation had to be rendered on single frames – 24 drawings per second, compared to most feature animation which requires half as many.’

Shoot sequences, screen them. That might be the norm. But the film had to be sent to Los Angeles for processing since no facilities exist in Toronto. And with so few Omnimax screens around, not even the viewing part was easy. Often, the production team leaders would fly to Pittsburgh, Pa., Smith says, to screen something as short as a nine-second test.

All along the way, the story was the same: technical considerations tended to dictate creative pathways. ‘It was something that had never been done before,’ says Smith. ‘There were no experts to phone, no suppliers in existence for technical parts.’

The Bear Spots team also worked with nasa’s Jet Propulsion Lab in l.a. to introduce computer-generated footage into the animated sequences. jpl provided computer-generated images of the starscapes and planets in their correct configurations as from the spaceship.

The ‘blend of technologies and techniques,’ then, includes cel animation, painted background, live footage from space, computer-generated images and digital compositing and 70mm film recording by Imax and Computer Film Company and ‘John Grower, the leading expert in North America on the visualization of astronomical data.’

Coproducers on the project were Graeme Ferguson and Toni Myers, with H.G. Kwon as co-ordinating producer. Smith headed the animation work and directed the final live action while Bear Spots’ Heather Walker produced the animation. Micky Erbe and Maribeth Solomon wrote the score and Bruce Nyznik handled sound design. Dave Martindale was the film’s advanced imaging specialist and Gord Harris the technical consultant.